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.