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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (339767)	6/7/2007 3:55:25 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1572702

It was a pretty dull "point of fact". Why did you make it? Because the issue of subsidies was raised in such a way as to imply that their a bunch of greedy pigs just feeding at the public trough and they deserve various negative statements and actions against them. Why spend $Billions when it will only lower your profit. For an individual company it probably wouldn't lower the profit, at least not the revenue, if demand keeps rising. But next time demand stagnates, or takes a slight dip, then the company could indeed receive less profit then if they hadn't made the investment. Longer term if alternatives take off the investment might turn out to be a poor one. $billions isn't the only important factor. Its the time new capacity takes (esp. new capacity in the form of the brand new refineries) to come online. Makes it hard to match supply with demand. Its a little like bringing up a new fab, but it might even be more extreme, esp. in terms of time. What about competition always keeping prices down and benefiting the consumer? What about capitalism as the great equalizer? Sometimes it just doesn't work, does it? Just about nothing always works perfectly, on all problems, in all situations. But competition in this area really hasn't worked all the poorly. Despite greatly increased demand over the years, real costs for the consumer where mostly going down until relatively recently. When the costs of entry are large, and new capacity takes a long time to come online, competition can take quite awhile to sort things out. In the long run it should, at least in most situations. But then again the long run is longer then most people want to deal with. Also sorting things out doesn't mean you get a happy solution for most people. It doesn't always mean low prices.