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I recently added Acquired to my go-to podcast short list and picked the Enron story from 2022. The story comes out hot on the heels of the FTX scandal/tragedy/fraud because of their similarities (and why the regulation that came after it helped prevent other Enrons). It's a long episode (1h 50m) but it's narrated so well and the story is so riveting that I didn't even notice. Theres this passage that I found interesting about half-measures and how they can and will be gamed (emphasis mine):

When you have, when your engineers know what the right answer is, but they also feel that the right answer is culturally unobtainable, you have a cultural problem. Bryan Cantrill on Intel after Gelsinger @ 33:22

I recently mentioned in my best of 2024 this quote from  Ryan Holiday: How to Win the War with Yourself [The Knowledge Project Ep. #208] : The problem is that the financial upside is always clear. Opportunity costs are sometimes clear, but often not clear. today I read this The Register article about Pat Gelsinger "resignation" from Intel. It mentions some of the opportunity costs that Intel got wrong (in hindsight, and many years later): The Itanium was going to be the high-end architecture, so there was no need for 64 bit extensions to x86, no matter how hard Microsoft asked. AMD disagreed, forcing Intel to grumpily adopt its standard. Atom was going to be the portable processor of choice, so let's flog off the Arm license. I find it always extremely fascinating to read about these stories, and hopefully learn something from them. And I think, in this case, it's really as Ryan Holiday put it: the financial upside is always clear (and sometimes too optimistic) and ...

I just read Prof's Galloway latest No Mercy/No Malice post ( link ) and I am actually not sure how to name my feelings after learning how low Intel has fallen. I've never been a particular fan of Intel ever since they were found to be bribing/coercing PC manufacturers to prefer Intel chips (instead of AMD): At its peak in 2000, Intel’s market cap was $500 billion. Since then, the S&P is up 243%, and Intel down 80%. If Intel had kept pace with the S&P, the firm would be worth 16X what it’s worth today. A stark reminder of this fall from grace: Jensen Huang (CEO, Nvidia) is worth more than Intel. The firm is at risk of being dropped from the Dow. Wow, just WOW!