Intel is a great example of the fact that between stupidity and low-integrity behavior as a default, the people in charge fuck up in ways that the man on the street would get right.

Defense is starting to get a blank check with fairly bipartisan support for the first time in at least 30-40 years and it's centered on semiconductor supply chains. There has never been a better time to secure the fucking funding, have ASML send twice as many people as they already have, and power through it. The market is whatever you want and the margins are whatever you want: in a functioning system? You fucking do it.

And while I will believe that Intel has suffered serious attrition in key posts, there's no way that the meta-knowledge of how to debug "we don't have the fabs running right, who do we hire, what so we need to give them to get it done" has evaporated in 5-10 years from the singular source of this institutional muscle memory in the history of the world.

The failing here is more like a failing in courage, or stamina, grit, something. It's a failure of the will to do the right thing for both the shareholders and the country.

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lenerdenator 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> It's a failure of the will to do the right thing for both the shareholders and the country.

They've been doing the exact right thing for the shareholders: squeezing the living shit out of an asset (x86/64) for decades while cutting anything interesting or competitive to the bone to give shareholders more money. Money spent on something that could really have been competitive is money not sent to the retirement fund that keeps John and Jane Q. Public swinging in more ways than one at their golf course retirement community in Florida.

The problem is, you can only do that for so long. There is a minimum spend to remain a competitive company with regard to being able to market products to consumers. Executives don't have a fiduciary duty to create the best possible product for consumers to look at and potentially buy in the marketplace, but they do have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to meet an earnings projection. If these two activities can coexist peacefully, great. If not, the first activity stops while the company gets gutted.

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benreesman 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's not actually good for the shareholders unless you have a divisor which is effort. Intel is a semiconductor company, investors that want to invest in treasuries or Exxon or whatever is considered extreme low-beta (ha, maybe not Exxon anymore, maybe Visa) have every opportunity to do so.

The most expensive, highest-margin, technically advanced and risky business in the world is for investors who want that in their portfolio. If they wanted to milk a dying industry on the way down they would go buy Disney stock.

It is very clearly in the interests of long-term investors in Intel to maintain a commanding position in fabrication: it's been the secret sauce of the company since the very beginning, it's never been more in demand.

This idea that companies are obligated to do what will deliver some little bump in the stock price in 90-180 days is everything from not how the rules work to just a lazy meme for people who don't want to earn their princely salaries.

Don't make excuses for weakness at the top.

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pishpash 4 days ago | parent [-]

Who are the marginal traders who determine prices though? Long-term holders don't trade. By the time they assert their view it's too late.

	▲	benreesman 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Much more complicated than that though market price action dynamics do play a role in corrupt corporate governance at some remove. Different market participants will be trading on different signals, sentiments, or theses, and this will influence everything from the order types they use to the hold time of the instruments in question. But one of many things they all have in common is that they know that what other people think about the future affects the price right now: an intuitive proof of this is that if some major announcement is made about e.g. trade policy, and the market deems it credible, you will see instruments transact up or down in price immediately. In any effort to go deeper, one must be wary that this goes from market microstructure to Ito calculus to voodoo real fast, a closed form solution would be an infinite money machine! But a reasonable jumping off point might be the notion of a Keynsian Beauty contest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest The TLDR is that hold times across like 13 orders of magnitude (rumor has it a cutting edge FPGA fielded by someone like Optiver or HRT or Virtu can pull a whole ladder in 20-50ns glass-to-glass, so whatever Buffet does divided by that) the market still in some sense reflects expectations about the future: it's "priced in" in trading parlance. "Too late" has some ways you can use it meaningfully in finance, but it's not in the sense I take you to mean above.

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extesy 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> They've been doing the exact right thing for the shareholders

Inflation-adjusted INTC [1] is the same as it was in 1997, including dividends! Shareholders have no real return from INTC for almost 3 decades.

[1] https://totalrealreturns.com/s/INTC

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joe_the_user 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would quibble with the exact right thing phrases but otherwise agree. Intel indeed followed a formula which is intended to and often does produce massive return for some time frame. The formula is indeed "gutting the company" - squeeze every part of an enterprise and return the results as profits. Whether destroying the companies long term prospects is worth these short term profits is a complex calculation.

A managers' duty is to promote long term value and stability, actually, but return enough short term profits and you trump that long investment income.

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benreesman 4 days ago | parent [-]

There are orhanized ways to wind down a business unit or even a whole business and convert the salvagable assets into shareholder value, these range from corp dev / M&A activity all the way through bankrupcy and bondholder seniority.

And in the days when fraud or "fraud-adjacent" behavior carried serious costs? When violating the social contract around pensions and severance and stuff had real reputational costs that followed the principles around? People used them when necessary. You sold off the assets sometimes.

But beginning with the LBO "innovation" in the 80s and running a line through Milken and shit all the way to the Vanguard/State Street/Blackrock "quasi-sovereign" level of PE asset capture?

People started arbing it, not by seeing value where others had missed it! By betting that Gordon Gecko had enough fans to make the arb work. "Gutting" a company slowely and painfully is in a bucket I'll call "fraud adjacent": usually not outright illegal (lotta "gray" work, gray edge), clearly not what society wants or intended, and you know it's a scam when you look in the mirror every night. i used to get wasted with these guys at Catch when I lived in NYC: they'll tell you everytging I am and more on five gin and tonics

There's no place for the word "duty" in any version of that argument unless you also use the word "derelict".

Don't excuse weakness at the top.

	▲	joe_the_user 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Don't think I'm using duty in any sense other than the sense than that the corporate raiders have set-up a situation where management feels forced to engage in the program of gutting they outline. All of this is part of the gutting of the US of course. By betting that Gordon Gecko had enough fans to make the arb work. "Gutting" a company slowely and painfully is in a bucket I'll call "fraud adjacent": usually not outright illegal (lotta "gray" work, gray edge), clearly not what society wants or intended Sure, but if society doesn't intend this, society has to f---ing do something. Clearly it's not. IE: if the only legal obligation of management is promoting maximum legally possible valuation over time, "squeezing" still makes sense if there's enough money to be had. The only way to change this is forcing the issue in some fashion or other.

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crusty 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>"They've been doing the exact right thing for the shareholders"

Clearly not as they've ended up suspending dividend payments altogether.

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consp 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The fiduciary duty is whatever the shareholders make of it, there is no need for it to be just monetary. If they were planning for long term instead of short term profits they would be making sure the company is still the world leader in 25 years. But since big investors are either pension funds or hedge funds (aka greedy bastards) you get earnings above all else.

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kortilla 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s a bullshit meme. One glance at the stock history shows that they haven’t been doing anything for shareholders for over a decade.

	▲	lenerdenator 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's because they're in a death spiral caused by gutting. At a certain point, you hollow yourself out, and you can't recover. Top-level talent doesn't want to work at a place that doesn't have a real shot. So things just... peter out.

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CamperBob2 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The climate of uncertainty under Trump inhibits long-term investment, whether in chip fabs, car factories, or anything else. He has reminded us all of something that's really always been a problem: whatever one Congress or one POTUS supports can be undone by the next.

Usually opposing parties have had the common sense not to immediately hit the undo button once they take office. E.g., Biden leaving most of Trump's previous nutty tariffs in place. But "common sense" isn't on the agenda these days. We are, to all intents and purposes, under attack from within.

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benreesman 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The decline in what we expect of our leaders has been going on my entire life and the contrast between 20 years ago and the present is stark.

In 1998 Meriwether and the rest of LTCM nearly crashed the economy, needed the Fed to get involved, and they were personally ruined, guy never opened a ten thousand dollar bottle of wine again and probably never had anything again. Shortly thereafter, Jeff Skilling took out offices in 9 cities and pension plans all over the country with shady accounting. 24 years in prison (reduced later to 14). Ebbers/Worldcom 2002: died in prison.

By 2008? Zero prosecutions. Bonuses the next year.

Around the same time Clinton got caught lying about chasing (consenting and of age) skirt in the Office: nearly ended his presidency, definitely ended his policy agenda, real consequences and he caught a shooting star to avoid far worse. The public was not going to accept it, Congress was not going to let it slide on either side of the aisle. Today? Something like that barely makes the press. You have to be accused of sex trafficking to even get an investigation started and everyone will probably walk.

The idea that this became uniquely bad in January, or even 2016 is demonstrably untrue. At some time in the last 30 years we started accepting leadership who are dishonest, nakedly self-interested, lie without consequences, enrich themselves via extraction rather than value creation, collude with no oversight, and sell out the public.

This is a completely bipartisan consensus on these norms. Speaking for myself, I think Trump represents a new low, but not by much, he's just the next increment in what history will probably call the Altman Era if his ascent to arbitrary power on zero substance continues on it's current trajectory.

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ffsm8 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's not even centered on the US. I personally think the Internet just desensitized us all.

Reasons for that are easy to come up, imo chief among them being web2.0 (social media) and the ever increasing degree with which people exaggerate everything just to get a reaction.

Under that context, what's a little skirt chasing compared to what people usually say about the politicians? And how are you gonna remember he did something a few months ago, when so many more extreme things have happened since?

Really, I feel like social media will be considered the most destructive force to society in 20-50 yrs

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usefulcat 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

30 years ago in the US, there were a handful of major TV news outlets, and most people got their news from one of those and/or a newspaper, of which there were also a limited number.

The thing about those sources is that for the most part, it wasn't really economically viable to alienate half the population by leaning hard right or left. Any reduction in audience would likely translate to a commensurate reduction in advertising revenue.

Today, there are many, many sources of 'news' available in various forms around the internet, and of course people are free to choose what to pay attention to. This means it's entirely feasible for each source to cater to a particular viewpoint, even at the expense of definitely alienating half or more of the theoretical potential audience.

I theorize that the reason for this is that people have voted with their feet, balanced sources aren't as profitable and that's why there are fewer of them. It makes sense, a more balanced take on events is by definition not nearly as sensational, and almost always requires more mental effort on the part of the listener.

That by itself would probably be enough to explain the current situation, but on top of that, we also have the fact that many people receive the above mentioned information via algorithms designed to feed them more of what they already like (i.e. agree with) and nothing else, which of course only amplifies the effect further.

I have no idea how we get out of this situation (or if in fact we will), but in my mind it's not surprising at all.

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panopticon 4 days ago | parent [-]

The cracks in the media were already visible 30 years ago. Conservative talk radio was taking off, people were beginning to call CNN "Clinton News Network", and Fox News was right around the corner. There was clearly an appetite—and a market—for partisan news. This was further fueled by the growth of national radio and TV networks that were less beholden to capturing local audiences.

I think the internet just supercharged a change that was already well underway.

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tstrimple 4 days ago | parent [-]

Agreed. And Democrats were fucking stupid and decided to just ignore all of the systems Republicans were putting into place over decades. There are multiple conservative think tanks who approve supreme court nominations and spearhead Republican policy. They have been working on it for decades. It's unfortunate that the only political party in this country which can look to the future an make long term plans is the one most likely to follow the Nazi party into the history books.

	▲	Nevermark 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Unfortunately, the policies you get from any party that is disciplined over decades in putting long term power plays ahead of good governance is ... more long term power plays. I usually can think of at least a few plausible/possible solutions to most problems. But I am not at all sure what the Democrat's right response should have been. However, a severe lack of legal tolerance for businesses that use technology to super-scale poisonous conflicts of interest, like surveillance backed ads and media feeds algorithmically manipulated for addiction/attention behavior would have been part of it. Zuck should have been put away for life a few accidental genocides ago. (IMHO)

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Henchman21 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s almost like the correct action to take would be a Luddite-style wrench-in-the-works. Sabotage in service of humanity. And as an added bonus, think of all the electricity we’d get back!

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johntarter 4 days ago | parent [-]

Bring on the Bureau of Sabotage from Frank Herbert's ConSentiency universe books!

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Henchman21 4 days ago | parent [-]

I will settle for a Butlerian Jihad to destroy the "thinking machines"

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eli_gottlieb 4 days ago | parent [-]

So we can all be forced into a feudal caste system and become mortally dependent on eugenically-bred drugged-up subcastes?

	▲	Henchman21 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		The survival of the species demands it.

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Volker-E 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed by all, but one: In 0 years.

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avhception 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's like watching the public discourse devolve into ever more screaming and posturing. The only winning move is not to play.

Sometimes I find myself thinking about that experiment with the perfect rat paradise. The overpopulation got so bad, the normal social functions of the rats started to break down and the rats started acting like sociopaths. Sometimes, I think that's what we're doing to ourselves by exposing the average human to millions of voices through the internet.

Of course, ironically, I'm ignoring my own advice and still engage with the Internet. Though I mostly keep to HN and some IRC.

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NavinF 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The mouse utopia experiment is mostly fake and researchers who reproduced the experiment didn't see any of those behaviors: https://gwern.net/mouse-utopia

It was just as wrong as predictions about human overpopulation like Malthusianism

	▲	avhception 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Oh thanks, I didn't know that! TIL!

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heavyset_go 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/q4k07...

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XorNot 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

But you're doing more then that: even in what you call a crisis you are refusing to engage with specific issues, resorting still to generalities and calls about "both sides".

Like there are any number of extremely specific issues which are not "screaming and posturing" unless you're dead set on not talking about them.

	▲	avhception 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Huh? "Both" sides? I didn't even think about any sides, much less specifically two of them. My comment wasn't even necessarily about online discussions concerning politics. It was just as much about, for example, the way people show off their fake-successful influencer-lifestyle or something like that. The ways that social media causes bad feelings like jealousy, for example.

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rossjudson 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We populate our corporate leadership with non-founders so highly compensated that actually succeeding does not matter to them. They've already "won" at the game, and they spend a lot of time posturing with respect to each other. They set the membership criteria for the "club", reinforce each others' positions, and use the ability to bestow membership to manipulate the political system away from regulating or taxing them.

In other words, I completely agree.

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daymanstep 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The rot has been going on for a lot more than 30 years. Try 70 years more like. LBJ openly cheated on his wife Lady Bird while he was in office and he never suffered any consequences for it. Eisenhower was the last good president.

	▲	Henchman21 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Not Carter?

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eli_gottlieb 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Around the same time Clinton got caught lying about chasing (consenting and of age) skirt in the Office: nearly ended his presidency, definitely ended his policy agenda, real consequences and he caught a shooting star to avoid far worse. The public was not going to accept it, Congress was not going to let it slide on either side of the aisle. Today? Something like that barely makes the press. You have to be accused of sex trafficking to even get an investigation started and everyone will probably walk.

The same President Clinton, with the same Congress, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and thereby effectively legalized much of the next 26 years of corporate malfeasance, starting with much of what enabled the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. And when they did this, it was popular and politically nonthreatening.

We got what we voted for.

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kevin_thibedeau 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You have to be accused of sex trafficking

The child sex ring that was uncovered in 2008 resulted in ludicrously light consequences and then after a repeat offense in 2019 was systematically ignored until now.

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drdec 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Around the same time Clinton got caught lying about chasing (consenting and of age) skirt in the Office: nearly ended his presidency, definitely ended his policy agenda, real consequences and he caught a shooting star to avoid far worse. The public was not going to accept it, Congress was not going to let it slide on either side of the aisle. Today? Something like that barely makes the press. You have to be accused of sex trafficking to even get an investigation started and everyone will probably walk.

I don't think Al Franken would agree with this

	▲	kevin_thibedeau 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That was an inside maneuver by Schumer to push him out because Franken was too principled to toe the line on the party hypocrisy.

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wat10000 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I blame Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich.

They heavily pushed the idea that the opposition could not have legitimacy. Gingrich did it through the exercise of power and Limbaugh did it on the airwaves. It wasn’t just that the opposition was wrong or bad for the country, standard democracy stuff, but that the opposition had no right to hold power at all. Once you start thinking that legitimacy is based on which side you’re on rather than who you are or what you do, you won’t care about bad leadership as long as it’s yours.

	▲	kevin_thibedeau 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Falwell and Reed were the genesis of modern conservative disgruntlement rooted in tribal identity. Limbaugh and Gingrich used that as fuel for deconstructing civil administration after the '94 regime change.
	▲	kelnos 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Couldn't agree more. And we see the continuation of this stuff today in Trumpist assertions that the 2020 election was rigged, simply because there's "no way" that Biden could have won over Trump. Trump's entire rhetoric relies on this tactic. Anyone who disagrees with him or tries to shut him down should be impeached, jailed, whatever, because they shouldn't be allowed to exercise their power against him, no matter how legally they wield it. It just makes me so angry to hear Vance say things like "judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power". Yes, they are! That's literally one of their jobs, specifically enumerated in the constitution! But that's the tactic: train people to believe that the judicial branch is not legitimate when it comes to executive branch decisions.

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tucnak 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm sorry, but to blame Intel's inadequacies on political climate is comedic.

	▲	4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		[deleted]
	▲	avn2109 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Intel's C-suite is gonna pick up this line of reasoning soon! "It's not our fault the stock crashed and the fabs don't run and TSMC is eating our lunch, blame Trump instead!"
	▲	CamperBob2 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[flagged]

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Nathanba 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Trump causes uncertainties in some areas but I would not say that fab investment or factories is one of those areas. The democratic president after Trump has pretty much kept the exact same course as Trump, even going so far as continuing to build the border wall that Trump started, continuing the tariff behavior as you noticed too and certainly they will continue to want chips factories at home in the US. That much is already clear when you look at what the democrats say and do. I would struggle to find anything other than deportation or tax schemes that the next president will change. And even there.. it's not like the democrats changed the so called Trump tax cuts "for the rich" when they were in power. One main area that comes to mind that democrats will attempt to change are social issues like policies around sports for trans people or bathrooms or POC/LGBT specific funding. As much as they (quite hilariously) keep telling everyone else to stop caring about this supposedly fringe issue, that's really the first thing they will probably try to reimplement. I still remember how Biden, in his ~1st week in office, immediately implemented farmer funding specifically for POCs. It's so absurd but this seems to be what they care about most, essentially on its face racial policies.

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alphabettsy 4 days ago | parent [-]

Saying the Democrats are uniquely focused on racial and LGBT issues is completely detached from reality.

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baggy_trough 4 days ago | parent [-]

In what way? This is a huge part of their message.

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tstrimple 4 days ago | parent [-]

It's more a huge part of messaging from conservatives about liberals. And that you think otherwise indicates your media bias. Democrats respond to Republican cultural issues. As they should. When Republicans state that immigrants are eating your cats and dogs you'd better well fucking address the nonsense otherwise people like you start thinking Haitians are actually out there eating people's pets.

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Nathanba 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

[flagged]

	▲	kelnos 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		[flagged]
	▲	Nevermark 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> no matter how bad Trump gets, at least he doesn't claim yet that the sky is green Just coal then? Trump speaks nonstop nonsense. His policies don't even make sense to what is left of the Republican Party that isn't "all with him". The left does get shrill about equal rights, but then, the people they aim to protect have been persecuted. I mean people actually brutalized for just being themselves - and I am talking about friends and family and ambulances, and surgeries after surgery. And now, Trump's idea of finding balance is to continue/resume denigrating many classes of people. So that's not an issue the Republican party comes out ahead on right now. I personally don't understand why anyone would label themselves right or left. Group identification is disastrous for balanced thinking. Like noticing the left is shrill, but not noticing the right's idea of balance is to ignore or celebrate second class treatment for millions of people. Group identification is also ruinous for any kind of actual innovative thinking, as apposed to ideology. Reality and reason have nothing to do with political power alignments. The runaway centralization of power within the two parties has become the biggest impediment to US competence.
	▲	tstrimple 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[flagged]

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baggy_trough 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s both.

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throw0101b 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Defense is starting to get a blank check with fairly bipartisan support for the first time in at least 30-40 years and it's centered on semiconductor supply chains.

Really? Because:

> During Donald Trump's 2025 speech to a joint session of Congress, the president asked House Speaker Mike Johnson to “get rid” of the subject act.[190]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act#Subseque...

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Spivak 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

tl;dr Intel desperately needs an activist investor.

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benreesman 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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Spooky23 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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avn2109 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	Spooky23 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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dreamcompiler 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Remember what finally happened to Mussolini?

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benreesman 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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pwarner 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

berkshire hathaway

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rossjudson 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	benreesman 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		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".

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dv_dt 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.