Idiot Government, Corporate Welfare and Crony Journalism

In today's politically charged climate it is amazing to see how far crony journalism  can go, in support of both Government officials statements and corporate lobbyists PR points, all without scrutinizing the facts.

The largest problems that the U.S. is facing are derived from too much concentration and lack of true competition in almost every sector of our economy. Whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge of government, large corporations seem to continue sucking taxpayer's dollars through government subsidies and financial bailouts.

While we expect professional journalists to scrutinize official statements coming from either Government or corporate PR through rigorous fact checking, what we too often witness, is that journalists prefer a cozy relationship with the powers at be, acting as a bullhorn or an echo chamber to "sell the line of the power player" to the grand public. 

On May 11, 2022 the Washington Post published an article, written by Jeanne Whalen entitled Sanctions forcing Russia to use appliance parts in military gear, U.S. says. The article begins with the following paragraph:
U.S.-led sanctions are forcing Russia to use computer chips from dishwashers and refrigerators in some military equipment, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Wednesday.

From there on, the article continues to explain that the U.S. Government position that the "technology exports" sanctions on Russia are working well and that the Russian military industrial complex is resorting to using "semiconductors" taken out of common home appliances to make up for parts shortages in its weapons systems.

Whalen goes further to explain:
Computer chips, also known as semiconductors, are the brains that operate most modern electronics, from appliances to fighter jets. Russia manufactures few of its own chips, historically relying on imports from Asian and Western companies.

After spending 45 years in the electronics industry, including decades in the semiconductor development and manufacturing sector I cannot but despair at the way professional journalists keep selling "fake goods" to the public.  In the above paragraph, Whalen is quoting (and provides links to) two of her own articles, previously published in "The Post", that supposedly give cover to her explanations. No wonder that Whalen chooses to quote herself, in order to portray legitimacy to her bizarre coverage of anything "semiconductor". I wonder where her expertise on the subject comes from? We will get back to this point, later on.

Empty Baby Formula Store Shelves

Another headline showed up in today's news outlets reads: 

Biden works to fix US formula crisis as parents scramble to keep babies fed

This article was published by The Guardian, where the writers explain:
The problem is the result of supply chain disruptions and a safety recall, and has had a cascade of effects: retailers are limiting what customers can buy, and doctors and health workers are urging parents to contact food banks or physicians’ offices, in addition to warning against watering down formula to stretch supplies or using online do-it-yourself recipes.

It is not clear why is is the job of the President of the U.S. to furnish baby formula to consumers. However, as is so common nowadays to ignore root causes, instead of pointing out that less than a handful of major manufacturers own 98% of that product market and when one of them (Abbot) failed quality control of its products, the floor caved from under the supply chain. Instead of figuring out that this event is an indicator of fundamental vulnerabilities in American industrial economics, which is a direct result of too high concentration in the nation's manufacturing sector, everything turns into political fire fight. I wonder what our President or Secretary Raimondo can do to actually solve this problem, when Corporate America keeps vigorously fighting any hint of government controls and continues to promote mergers, business take overs and industrial concentration, which mostly benefit the Executive Class, while reducing consumers choices and eventually lead to price gouging, even without supply chain problems.

The reflexive political survival choice immediately leads our government officials to come up with stupid statements like the one mentioned in Whalen's article, about how the Russians cannot get (what Raimondo refers to as) "semiconductors" for their war machines. It is not clear if the secretary of Commerce even knows what "semiconductors" mean, because public education about the subject was mostly formed by journalists who did not bother to educate themselves on the subject before parroting what industry lobbyists kept feeding them.

In reality, Semiconductors are a family of materials. Semiconductors are NOT computer chips, though computer chips are made out of semiconductor materials, as well as many more, other, NON-semiconductor materials. Semiconductors are NOT even remotely associated with brains, unless a brainless journalist repeats conducting and propagating false information to the public!

While the average car contains approximately, 800 electronic components, most of these components are not semiconductor-based. These components are known as capacitors, resistors, conductors (wires), connectors and circuit boards. Most Automotive Semiconductor Components, are NOT so-called computer chips, they include diodes, signal transistors, power transistors, electro-optical components and a variety of analog and digital chips. Only the minority of automotive semiconductor components are dedicated to control and computing functions and these are considered a special class of computing devices, known as "embedded controller" or "micro-controller".

The reality is that most common electronic components are either manufactured inside, or shipped into China, where the largest industrial base of electronic manufacturing has been established over the last 20 years. In spite of crying wolf over the last two years, companies like Intel Corp. and others have invested tens of billions of dollars on establishing manufacturing base in China. In spite of poisonous rhetoric, this is not going to change much. The lure of well educated cheap labor, particularly in the high-tech sector, and the fact that the Chinese armed forces (PLA) donating their recruits to work at Western companies in China, while being paid peanuts for their work

The savings on labor costs that companies like Intel Corp., Dell, HP and others are gaining on each year of operations in China amounts to billions of dollars over a decade. The picture below was taken at the cafeteria of Intel Corp. facilities in Changdu (PRC). All of the people in uniform that you see in that picture, are officers of the Chinese armed forces, yet they are also regular employees of Intel Corp. No doubt the savings on payroll are substantial to Intel Corp. and most valuable to the Chinese government in other ways...

The anecdotal story (without evidence) of the Russian army using "semiconductors" out of household appliances in their weapons systems, as a indication of the trade sanctions working, is a complete farce. Because, as mentioned earlier, most common electronic components are either manufactured in, or shipped into China, Chinese electronic component distributors are the largest in the world and readily ship electronic components at a very good price, to any destination in the world, including Russia. Global merchant companies like Alibaba, Aliexpress, Banggood, etc. ship millions of electronic parts, including microprocessors, memory parts and micro-controllers every day. I am buying electronic parts from these venues, almost every week! For the Chinese companies there is no reason to stop shipping electronic components through the mail, to anyone who is paying willingly. Can the U.S. Government monitor Chinese postal or other shipping services going to the Russian market as small packages? Seriously?

It is nice to see more competition in the Graphics Processor market, with Intel declaring their "Johnny come lately" entry into that market that has been dominated for decades by Nvidia and AMD. Intel Corp. own statement regarding the new ARC line of graphics processors, confirms my statements about China remaining at the center of "all things electronic", with very little chance of the global electronic manufacturing bases, relocating out of China, for at least a decade to come.

 According to Intel "ARC" Visual Compute Group web site:

We will release our entry-level Intel Arc A-series products for desktops (A3) first in China through system builders and OEMs in Q2. Etail and retail component sales will follow shortly in China as well. Proximity to board components and strong demand for entry-level discrete products makes this a natural place to start. (see: 

https://community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Products-and-Solutions/Gaming/Engineering-Arc-5-9-2022/post/1383055

Any attempts of shifting public views through "metaverse", built upon a series of blitz PR campaigns, cannot transform deep economic factors, established over decades of globalization, into real-life facts. The only people who seem to believe in such imaginary economic transformation are our clueless politicians who seem to be towed by their nose by industry financed lobbying firms.

A case in point:
In spite of a blitz effort by the Intel Corp. corporate PR machine to capitalize on the so-called "semiconductor shortages" bandwagon, Intel sales to the automotive industry, world-wide have been less than one percent (1%) of the company's total sales, according to the company's own annual reports. However, by way of major PR manipulation, Intel, Qualcomm AMD and other major Semiconductor industry players, somehow managed to convince the U.S. Senate to donate 52 billion dollars of your hard earned money, to enrich the executives of their industry, under the catch-all excuse of "national security". It is not clear at all why these companies, which made money hand over fist in the last decade, are crying about and why taxpayer's money is needed to add to their profits. Is baby formula less important than semiconductor manufacturing? Any concentration of industrial capabilities will lead to non competitive monopolistic behavior and single-sourcing, thereby creating massive disastrous consequences, when these sources fail to deliver for any reason. However, apparently, there are no boundaries of rational thinking in the world of Idiot Government, where big money keeps calling the shots at taxpayers expense.

Regardless of other issues concerning how to best spend US taxpayer's dollars in the best interest of the people of the US, the semiconductor industry in the world is part of a Global Value Chain (GVC), in which the US is still at the top of the value pyramid. The GVC depends on extensive collaborations among all actors in the chain. Crying wolf while coming to the US Congress with a tin cup in hand and insisting on industrial isolation can only harm the US position across wide geographical areas of economics, particularly in Asian countries that are currently not aligned with China. Such countries may potentially fall into China's hands, once the current structure of the GVC is disrupted due to the polarization in US politics. "May you get what you wish for" is an ancient gypsy curse...

I would like to see the US public to invest more time into learning about the GVC works to better understand what to convey to our politicians as our people wants. Responsible journalists (and they are there) should take the lead on informing and educating the public about the significant shifts in world economics and how the US can do best through smart collaboration with our world economic allies over the upcoming decades. 

  

 

Historical Overview

Welcome to the COREDUMP.COM historical site
maintained by Dr. Flywheel

The world of collaborative computing was once a clean and naive environment. Hackers were the good guys who always try to think outside of the box, attempting their best to advance the art and function of computing through far reaching collaboration. We all reached into our own pockets to develop and build a better collaborative platform that would enable all participants to exchange ideas and discuss all issues freely and (seemingly) at no cost.

This domain was established in the Summer of 1985 during the pre-Internet era and before Networks Solution Inc. received their mandate from IANA to rip us off by charging money for domain name registration. The domain name was inspired by term coredump, a procedure that was frequently used by computer programmers to debug computer software behavior, off-line, before much more effective, on-line diagnostic tools were developed and deployed.

Above: Photograph of a typical magnetic core memory module. A full size memory board would consist of many of these modules connected to electronic drivers and sense amplifiers to form a complete (and non-volatile) memory system for computer use

The early version of computer hardware that we used on this Internet Node was powered by an 80386 CPU manufactured by AMD. The motherboard was an early prototype with the CPU running at a clock frequency of measly 5 MHz. On top of this hardware we managed to trim the software to the minimum necessary to execute a very slim version of the BSD386 operating system. Eventually, this hardware was adapted to become a dedicated, stand-alone, floppy-disk based IP Edge Router (gateway), appropriately named GATEWAY.COREDUMP.COM. Amazingly, this piece of computer hardware served as our network gateway, over the next 10 years, non-stop around the clock (24/7),with very few service interruptions. Try to beat this record with any of today's electronic products...

Computer payload traffic in the 1980's was rather limited in content types. Most traffic consisted of email and Usenet interest-based group discussions. Occasionally we used Telnet to help each other solve technical problems, remotely. Those were the days when trust and cooperation served as the basis for advancing the art and engineering of computing. What drove most of us was the sense of community and the spirit of participating in a shared goal that exceeded what each of us could achieve on our own. This collaboration would eventually lead to technological advancements that exceeded our wildest expectations.

In 1986 I started working at the National Semiconductors Portland Development Center (PDC) as a senior systems developer. Consequently, the next hardware powering COREDUMP.COM became a one-of a kind engineering prototype of a 32-bit computer, using a National Semiconductor Corp. NS-32032 as the application processor and NS-32016 as the I/O processor.

National Semiconductor NS 32032 Silicon
Die

The hardware platform was given the code name was "ORCA". Since I could not control my urges to "mod" the computer, I ended up overclocking the main processor to a whooping 13.56 MHz... :) (up from the nominal frequency of 10 MHz). To achieve this "unbelievable" performance gain I actually used a Radio Shack crystal that was originally meant to be used for CB Channel-5 (27.015 MHz). The system's main clock generator was modified to provide a stable waveform at the desired new master clock frequency. To mark the successful performance upgrade, I renamed the new computer node:
CHANNEL-5.COREDUMP.COM

The operating system used by this "beefy" new system was Genix, a customized version of Bell Labs UNIX System 5 Version 4, otherwise known as SVR4 that was ported to run on NS32 hardware.

National Semiconductor NS 32032 CPU Package
(Note the "-10" designation for a 10 MHz system clock specification)

Communication with other participating computing nodes on our improvised communication network was achieved using dial-up lines with standard telephone-based modems. We started with 1200 baud modems and soon upgraded to 9600 baud. When modem technology improved, we upgraded to 14,400 baud and eventually to 56k Baud. Due to to the fact that most of our collaborators lived in the Pacific Northwest our volunteer based networks was appropriately named RAIN.NET

Without a doubt, the person that we all owe thanks for in facilitating our volunteer based computer network in later years, is Alan Batie. Alan volunteered to provide a stable base in Portland, Oregon that would serve as a communication hub for the rest of us, computer hackers.

See Alan's historical web site at: https://alan.batie.org/.

The Next Generation

The ICM-332 Industrial Computer Module:

Original Advertising Picture of the ICM-332 Genix (UNIX SVR4) Based Embedded Computer
(click on image to enlarge detail)

Below is the description of the ICM-332 capabilities from the advertising brochure. Among other things NSC provided an optimizing 'C' compiler, a debugger and a variety of diagnostic and development tools to its OEM customers.

(click on image to enlarge detail)

To be continued...