>The simple and straightforward electromechanical mechanisms we used for three centuries before integrated circuits
Lets see, 2026 minus 300 is 1726. No electronics, analog or digital back then at all. Not even gas powered streetlights.
Did you mean, three decades ago? That was 1996... so no, it was pretty much digitally controlled, even at the 'washing machine and toaster oven' level.
By 1976 Motorola and Advanced Semiconductor Materials were both in full production. Intel and Microchip Technologies, which was where the 'chips controlling appliances' movement really began as a spin-off from General Instrument's microelectronics division, were online by 1986.
Yes, much more can and should be done to improve and refine the wasteful consumerism treadmill that is central to US industry, but it is not a fundamental need to drive this improvement via cheering the loss and destruction of modern semiconductor manufacturing global capacity. Perhaps you are just repeating some misinformed "it will be better after we finish breaking everything" rhetoric.
The rest of us need to do whatever we can to keep this uninformed point of view from 'catching' in yet another corner.
You are more than welcome go back to washing your own laundry in a wringer bucket and storing winter ice in a shed for summertime cooling. So, kindly run along, log off and dream about the good old days in the shade of a waning empire.
"Teach your kids to kiss ass and play poltiics"(sic) ?
Does one have any significant quality time to spend with the children during the formative and developmental stages in their early lives, while engaging in major corporation sociopathetic ass-kissery?
TLDR; being an excellent (or sociopathic) ass-kisser is one way to the top; if alone at the top on your way to alone at the rest-home with kids, exes, and former employees who hate you is the desired outcome.
Are the techniques one must be adept at to manage an extensive cohort of subjects|employees|associates appropriate means of influencing the developmental progress of children, such that they can be actually happy and a beneficial influence on their own partners, progeny, and greater society?
Otherwise, does it only matter that they then have the capacity and rapacity to remain in a position to become or remain rampant over-consumers in pursuit of the most expensive visages of "happiness."
How about using the accumulated wealth in the betterment of those childrens' lives by teaching them to cooperate in meaningful adventures, to build strong and lasting relationships of kindness, to consume with regards to the full scope of the externalized costs of that consumption, to enjoy the act of creation and production of meaningful insight in art and science ?
If one's actual goal is the qualitatively and quantitatively better long term outcomes in the lives of those children; isn't a more stable and harmonious life with the reward of success measured by the reduction in suffering both within and around them by finding their own unique and innate power to imagine, cooperate, discover, and grow, all while contributing to the knowledge base and capability of humanity?
If the goal is: a widening clan of bickering, profit seeking, materialistic, continually dissatisfied workaholics with a series of divorces, early cirrhosis of the liver, to end their days spending down the accumulated wealth in a lonely senior-dementia-warehouse, well sir or madam, carry on.
The Longer part - a.k.a. "what the hell do I know about anything?":
FWIW, I am quite grateful that the fortune500 CEO/COO vater meins was principally unavailable or unable to instill most of his 'techniques' for success in my own early years. He was somewhat more present and it is debatable, malignantly, involved during more of the developmentally significant stages of my younger siblings. The results have been a mixed bag of world class success in the some arenas of life with world class catastrophic outcomes for the other arenas for at least 2/5 to 4/5 of his admitted progeny, depending on how one measures those arenas.
My own, albeit limited, advantage from milder exposure to his 'capabilities' has informed a strong aversion to the quest for infinite collateral resources and externalized risks through manipulation and deceit with and among others.
I wouldn't have it any other way, and have lived a life of immeasurable richness; having years spent with the freedom to ponder, opportunity to discover novelty, create opportunities for many to learn and participate in the arts and sciences. With the freedom to chose vainglorious poverty, indulging in a selfish amount of free time; nine years in total, doing nothing more than looking after goats and gardens in some of the wildest tropical jungle at the princely cost of less than $300 USD per month, all-in. Surviving on wild boar, feral oxen, gamefowl, marine and river fishing, all while living as prehistorically as we could imagine with my spouse and best friend. (Same person) No hot running water, barely any electricity, no petrochemical fuels, and the scarcest of rain shelter in one of the wettest places on earth. It was a kingdom unto itself, and we answered to no one for our daily needs.
Barter and trade of the product of our own two hands among the other, more civilized, inhabitants provided everything we could not make and do without. Occasional travel, by road, by air, and by sail were accomplished without needing a bank account or a land-line. We needed little, and wanted for nothing more than the continued opportunity to live among the tree frogs and roaring streams.
Tell me you're richer, without the ability to live and make lifelong friends through no hidden agenda beyond helping a community of your own choosing to do what is agreed by that community to be best for everyone; and I'll call you a fool with pockets full of money, wasting breath on children who will neither grow wise nor kind by your words and example.
Also, this isn't a sour grapes POV. I have managed a 30B PE fund, nominally in control of several hundred B worth of assets that produce significant percentages of US and global consumption of at least three commodities with properties and operations on 5 continents, and which holds patents in carbon negative and renewable power technologies and which controls some of the operations utilizing those patents. I have contributed personally to the concepts enabling bare-metal layer of hypervisor development, over 20 years ago when hardware and in-kernel virtualization were the dreams of a glorious future. I do know the difference between money and wealth, first hand. I'll take freedom over never-ending consumerism, all my live-long days.
^ this whole chain-of-interaction is a wonderful reminder of why I left SO: It was like seeing a movie trailer about a remake of some nearly forgotten B- horror film one was unfortunately allowed to watch when far too young.
Spoiler warning for those who havent seen this movie before:
Callous disregard for the utility and purpose of both the 'Q' and 'A' users; thinly veiled in a 'you don't get to tell me what i care about', wrapped in a 'my concept of how to moderate is just the way it is; if you don't like it, go F* yourself' package, trimmed with a ribbon of 'who do these Lusers that pay the bills think they are' directed at both the site owners (who write the checks to pay the bills) and all three relevant types of visitors, Q's, A's and those who neither ask, nor answer questions, but do see Advertisements and indirectly generate the income which the site owners use to write checks. But who cares?!, since Mods are not being paid (or paid well enough) to adjust a maladjusted concept of 'the way things are' into 'giving a shit' for anyone. Closed with some more vitriol declaring the site still exists and continues to be useful (as nipples on a chicken).
WASH, RINSE, REPEAT...
That was so last decade; I just stopped giving a damn, removed my browser bookmarks and learned to skim past less frequent and less relevant links to useless and meaningless SO pages when they appear in search results.
The funniest outcome is that LLMs will continue to ingest the diminishingly accurate content of sites like this and continue to degrade the utility of even the most broadly defensible LLM use case scenario.
phew, haven't thought that deeply about SO in at least 4 ... wait its 2026, make that 5 years. Good riddance to the the Whole Lot of you.
TSMC running stateside != "nevermind Taiwanese independence"/"US withdrawing military protection for Taiwan"
For starters, TSMC has opened facilities in Az, but these are still owned and operated from Taiwan and rely significantly on Taiwanese capability for substantial inputs to the development process in both knowledge and operational capacity.
The new wafer capacity is not a replacement for Taiwan based infrastructure, but rather an extension of those operations.
And to be blunt: If amerika were to immediately about-face on 1975's "back-to-basics" math movement and resume math theory based primary education in order to develop the foundational comprehension necessary for the materials science at|in the design level workforce, it would still be at least one generation before homegrown capacity was 'on-par' with the current Taiwanese (and Dutch) resources.
TLDR; not a concern from a rational leadership condition.
However, pretending that one TSMC plant in Az is sufficient reason to TACO and post on social media in saggy golf pants == very much a potential outcome; regardless of the absolute immediate cost in lives and material capability, and the unavoidable long term consequences both within the US and around the world caused by said capricious behaviour.
I really didn't mean to imply that one TSMC plant in AZ could replace Taiwan, nor that we should only care about semiconductor wafer output or worse to discount the desires of the Taiwanese people. Presumably, at least some large fraction of them wish to remain independent from China.
From a US strategic perspective, there are a lot of other things made in Taiwan other than just semiconductors. They make a lot of machine tools, for example, and tend to have better quality than what we can get imported from China directly. The castings are likely made in China mainland but then finished in Taiwan. You can get nearly identical machines from either source but the Taiwan-made version is generally superior.
My late grandfather (passed in 2022 at the age of 104) showed us all how it could be done. In 2014! During one of my infrequent visits to his house; he was complaining about the state of the latest Windows installation on his new laptop, and saw me driving Debian+KDE and asked about switching.
I told him that Ubuntu was probably the best fit for someone changing/doing one's own install. And that was pretty much the extent of the conversation, we went on to talk more about raising beef on land without petrochemical fertilizers, and how he missed the flavor from his youth, circa 1930's vs what he could get in the store today.
A few years later, the next time I was in his living room, his somewhat older - the same - laptop was on his kitchen table with OpenOffice spreadsheets and something he was working on, running the latest Kubuntu flavor. I asked who he had asked to install it; he has a number of technically proficient descendants who live much closer and who visit far more frequently than I did, so I presumed one of my cousins had helped.
He acted a little gruff, told me he had switched to Ubuntu+gnome by reading and following the instructions, and had then decided he tried out the K Desktop and preferred it enough to just make the switch without reinstalling.
Had a bit of fun hearing him explain how he "hadn't been fond of some of the Ubuntu decisions with window managers but liked having both environments installed as somethings were better in K, and other things were better from Gnome."
In thinking about how ready he was, in his 90's, to fully read and follow instructions reminds me that he was from a generation whose automobile user manual came with instructions for adjusting the piston timing as well as how to bleed and adjust brake pressure.
Why does everyone act like switching to Linux from Windows is just too hard for "Kathy and Wayne"? The fact of the matter seems to be we have lost either the _ability_, or the _willingness_, to read-and-follow-directions in the general population. The end result of either is the same.
I've coached a few normies through a Linux installation and there are always 3 things that confuse them and it never improves.
1. Understanding they have to back up their current hard drive somehow. What even is a back up? How do they do it? What do they need to back up? How does it get restored? I tell them to put their important files on a flash drive, but it's not obvious.
2. How to boot into the flash drive with the Linux image on it, and what that even means. The instructions for this are usually sparse because every laptop enters BIOS with a different key and has a different way of choosing the boot device from there.
3. The disk configuration in the installer. They have no idea what to do here. There is usually not a simple default with friendly text to click through. It's impossible to write coherent instructions for this if the user doesn't understand what a drive even is, conceptually.
#3 is surprising, I don't remember the last time I saw a distro installer without a "just wipe the disk and set up the recommended partitions" option, and most machines usually just have 1 drive.
There's some funky things like drivers etc but on the whole switching to Linux is probably even easier for Kathy and Wayne (sorry, Alice and Bob) because the updates won't randomly break like MS's do
I had a hardware raid array, which in the middle of resilvering (with an XFS filesystem), suffered a power loss. It turned out that the initial drive failure was symptomatic of the impending power supply failure, and after replacement of the PSU, was unable to resume resilvering due to a corruption of filesystem metadata...
I carried the drives around in hopes of recovering the codebase for a virtualized+distributed SSI OS (Kerrighed-module-based), which had been in the works for about a year at that point.
Due to changes between 2.4/2.6 and 3.x kernel; the rise of user-level distributed computing in C/RIU, kubernetes+docker, I never really recovered the work: there were partial backups of some of the features scattered across three contributors' systems, but no coherent backup of the unifying components; and well "life" with one of the key contributors becoming 'Justice Impacted' stalled any real progress.
I use this as a personal motivation for RAID!=Backup.
We may be entering into a new zero trust model for software development; one which for every necessary functionality the safer path includes 'roll your own' and building suites without externalizing the long term support of these functions to third parties.
It's a scary thought, and very much requires intense effort to build reliability from the ground up. In-house, on-premesis and private models will require significant investment (not just infra but also real design and engineering skill-sets) to move away from the 'build it fast and break things' approach.
The days of much work being done by junior programmers in a constant burnout, replace them at-will, lay-off whenever possible mindset which seems to have been the drive behind NPM and the java(script) world for the last several decades may be winding down. Layoff trends in commercial software appear to show ownership's perspective that historic workloads can now be accomplished by a few remaining programmers and an LLM budget.
Using 'Chat-Oriented Programming' (Steve Yegge's term), if done with an effective approach to technical and operational debt, may enable software development teams to absorb the extensive private function library burden. It may be that the potential n-times productivity available through codegen LLM is necessary leverage to provide a supportable silo of in-house functions, and the 'public repository' approach becomes only safe in an environment with isolation between trusted and untrusted-and-thus-disposable instances of features/functions/applications.
These conditions may again require fully staffed development shoppes. Lets hope the reversal happens before the current talent pool is lost to whatever work they find, or before they learn to farm sustainably and lose the desire to sit at a terminal all day.
On thing is certain; we are experiencing some truly interesting history.
It seems we have entered the Find Out phase of FAFO; which FA began with a lack of preparation in US educators in the 1960's for "New Math" which focused on conceptual understanding and abstractions, such as set theory and differential number bases. This lack of preparation, especially among primary educators (who had not themselves encountered mathematical theory in their own education) led to a regression; "Back to Basics" in the mid 1970's. Those missteps; both in educator preparedness, and in systemic regression to a rote memorization approach were substantially aggravated by reduced standards testing in the 1980's to hide the resulting weaknesses resulting from this regression.
First hand experience as a student through these epochs from the late 70's through the 80's and 90's in US academia led to thinking I was 'not good at mathematics.'
For me the 'breaking point' of this pattern was the discovery that even with an undergraduate STEM degree from a PAC10 university, including 'advanced' math courses available therein, I was not sufficiently mathematically educated to qualify for enrollment in a post-graduate physics program at a leading scientific institute or to participate in advanced mathematics discourse at an international mathematics symposium.
During COVID lock-down I attempted graduate level bio-molecular studies from several tier-one US and UK online university programs and ran into proctored coursework where the educators opined that "some problems are simply intractable due to scope or complexity" and I was unwilling or unable to accept that there was no approach to solutions for these systems.
The ensuing self-directed relearning from international curricula and classical resources has remedied my misconception of inability; extended my approaches to include concepts such as p-adic bases and complex topological approaches. and shows that current cohorts of US students will need to become self empowered to learn conceptual math beyond what their educators believe achievable.
Those who do not grok math will always be in the position of being taken advantage of by those who do.
This! All day long.
For a minute Pre-COVID and the inevitable reassessment of my life choices, I was a Private Equity fund manager for a International PE org with significant assets in a wide spectrum of energy technology and agriculture ventures.
We operated with a slightly different approach; leveraging long term lease back of land and physical resources to the original operators with caveats, such as transitioning to Organic Certification and Cost Effective Staffing - read that as Wallpapering the Products' Perceived value while shorting the personnel costs through under-staffing and underpaying - with some real improvements which included international market access and lower ecological footprints by ceasing deforestation for expansion and removing toxic petrochemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides from the operations which are actually beneficial to both employees and the community.
However, the standard modus operandii in the industry was and still is some flavor of this get in, grow, leverage, and then exit approach.
Individual operations' access to low to no interest financing for OPEX and CAPEX was a fundamental uplift to the value of those operations. There existed the possibility of leveraging the organizations' histories to secure low-to-no interest loans equal to the estimated market value of those operations; spend that money to expand and partially offset the cost of acquisition (protecting the investment funds from market volatility) and leverage those expansions to reduce competition through assimilation or under-pricing the competition.
Often the 'exit strategy' can include sell-off of physical assets to cover the loans; or folding the organization and defaulting on outstanding loans.
The fund never actually has to be at risk, the upsides are up-front during the stage wherein the public sees the 'investment' into expansion of or improvement of goods and services before the inevitable degradation due to under-staffing and cost cutting through volume renegotiation or through changing suppliers and processes for cheaper and less effective inputs. When customer satisfaction and employee burnout reach a crescendo... move on.
The end for me was when the organization decided to use COVID as an excuse to cut an entire environmental tech development team from payroll; with zero benefits and the expectation that local government to provide the entire cost of team members and their families' survival, while selling the technology invented and being developed by those team members for approximately one dollar to show as great a loss as possible.
PE is at least as big a blight on the global economy and community well being as joint-stock monopolies serving a few majority shareholders.
Lets see, 2026 minus 300 is 1726. No electronics, analog or digital back then at all. Not even gas powered streetlights.
Did you mean, three decades ago? That was 1996... so no, it was pretty much digitally controlled, even at the 'washing machine and toaster oven' level.
By 1976 Motorola and Advanced Semiconductor Materials were both in full production. Intel and Microchip Technologies, which was where the 'chips controlling appliances' movement really began as a spin-off from General Instrument's microelectronics division, were online by 1986.
Yes, much more can and should be done to improve and refine the wasteful consumerism treadmill that is central to US industry, but it is not a fundamental need to drive this improvement via cheering the loss and destruction of modern semiconductor manufacturing global capacity. Perhaps you are just repeating some misinformed "it will be better after we finish breaking everything" rhetoric. The rest of us need to do whatever we can to keep this uninformed point of view from 'catching' in yet another corner.
You are more than welcome go back to washing your own laundry in a wringer bucket and storing winter ice in a shed for summertime cooling. So, kindly run along, log off and dream about the good old days in the shade of a waning empire.