Mannerisms

For most people, tomorrow is a day of humiliation. You have to vote for someone who's led either by a smarmy, lying, opportunist (Labour and Tory parties) or a boring old git (Lib-Dems).

If a man can truly be judged by the company he keeps, then Gordon Brown’s made a good start.

You have to ask the question? Could the quarter of a billion euros paid to Intel by the Irish government have been better spent?

It’s very odd to see the Wall Street Journal today complaining about the EC’s application of anti-trust law to Intel. After all the WSJ is the organ of American business, and America pretty much invented modern anti-trust law with the Sherman Act of 1890.

Who’d be a Prime Minister? Just as Tony Blair got the Good Riddance reaction when he went, the Japanese are currently delivering a similar response to the resignation of their prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

As in the UK, so in the US. VCs in both countries are up in arms about the near-doubling of the tax-rate they pay when they realise their investments.

The American nutter fringe is apparently gearing itself up for a political battle to stop Abu Dhabi-based investment group, the Mubadala Development Company, buying 8 per cent of AMD for $600m.

The MEDEA+ meeting in Budapest did the ritual bemoaning of the limited public spending which Europe bestows on its high-tech industries but, in some ways, companies are lucky to get any subsidies at all, if you look at some of their past behaviour.

It seems that the Wassenaar Arrangement, aimed at restricting high technology transfers to China, has been quietly subverted by the US administration with the announcement that IBM is to transfer bulk CMOS 45nm manufacturing technology to the mainland China foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).

Change is the winning political formula according to Gordon, Hillary, Barack, John Edwards, John McCain, Mitt, Rudy and David Thompson. David who?

One would have thought that the idea of merging Europe’s Big Three semiconductor companies would have been put to bed forever, but last week it surfaced again with a proposal for a three-way merger made by an ex-ST guy to the new fun-loving French president.

Politicians come expensive in the US. According to the US magazine Forbes, Qualcomm spent $1.5m lobbying pols in Q1 2008.

That Great American, Lyndon Baines Johnson, 36^th President of the United States of America, had a useful little homily: "Never miss a chance to get laid or take a piss."

Who will be the Chief Technology Officer of the USA? US President-elect Barack Obama has said he's going to create such an office and there is intense speculation in the US technology industry about who will be appointed to fill it.

One of the benefits, or tribulations, of being elected a head of state seems to be that every one and their dog lines up to tell you what to do.

Quite clearly the financial authorities in the UK and US haven't got a clue. Both the Governor of the Bank of England, Lord Mervyn King, and the Secretary of the US Treasury, Henry Paulson, are useless at sorting out the financial mess.

Is Intel trying to stall the EC's anti-trust investigation? You bet. Back in the summer we learnt that the EC had reviewed the evidence in the case and decided, like the Japanese and Korean governments, that Intel had acted in an anticompetitive way.

Another day, another proposed bail-out. Interesting to hear the European arm of SEMI, the US-based trade body for the semiconductor materials and manufacturing equipment industry, calling on the EU to put money to supporting the European chip industry.

Proof, if further proof were needed, that the USA is turning towards socialism, comes with the news that an alliance of companies is looking for $2 billion of government funds to get into batteries for electric cars.

'Inflation, extravagance, bankruptcy' were, according to Gordon Brown speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum , the three words which condemned Britain to the Great Depression of the 1930s. They were scrawled by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer  in response to a stimulus plan proposed by John Maynard Keynes.

President Barack Obama's appointment this week of the members of the USA's Science and Technology Council looks as if it has fallen into exactly the same trap as the UK does in these matters: it has too many scientists and not enough technologists.

With Japan, Korea and Europe finding that Intel breached anti-trust law, who will be next? The EU sent its report on the Intel case to the anti-trust authorities in 27 countries. The US FTC, which has been investigating Intel for a year, received a copy of the report and could be the next country to bring an action.

It's typical of the Europeans to devise a political structure which produces sillier and sillier results with each election it holds.

If the US government parlays its anti-trust investigations against Google into legal proceedings, it will be one of the youngest-ever companies to be subjected to a US government anti-trust case.

Google was only founded in 1998. A ten year gap between founding and first anti-trust proceeding would be a US record.

After all it took 44 years after the founding of Standard Oil by John D Rockefeller in 1863 for the US government to initiate anti-trust proceedings in 1911.

It took a massive 89 years after the founding of AT&T in 1885 for the US government to split the company up into the Baby Bells in 1974 after anti-trust proceedings.

IBM went for 60 years after its founding in 1896 before anti-trust action by the US government forced it to operate under the Consent Decree of 1956 which obliged IBM to disclose technical information which allowed other computer companies to compete.

For Microsoft, founded in 1975, it was 23 years before the US government first initiated anti-trust proceedings in 1998.

So the ten year-old Google has been something of a phenomenon. Presumably it's happened quickly for Google because the Internet allows companies to grow to enormous size by very quickly tapping into global markets.

Carlo Bozotti, CEO, seems to be getting the hang of this semiconductor thing. In a stroke worthy of his illustrious predecessor, he has got the French government to stump up a good chunk of change to support ST's process R&D and most advanced production facility.

It seems a bit weird for Intel to be urging its Irish staff, all 4,200 of them, to vote for the Lisbon Treaty when it's put before the Irish people for the second time in October.

You'd think the last people to object to Google photographing their streets would be the Swiss, because the Swiss never get up to anything interesting on their streets.