Posts Tagged ‘Semiconductors’

Busting F-35 Myths

Saturday, January 13th, 2024

Lockheed Martin just assembled the 1,000th F-35, making it one of the most widely produced and successful modern fighters ever. Here’s a pretty good video busting various myths about the F-35.

  • “There are more F-35s in the world today than there are all other stealth aircraft ever built by all nations combined.”
  • “There are more F-35s on the deck of the USS Tripoli in this single picture than there are stealth fighters in all of Russia.” Eh, supposedly Russia has managed to finally get 20 Su-57s into service, which matches the 20 plane test deployment of the F-35Bs to the Tripoli. But it’s Russia, so several shakers of salt are in order.
  • “The F-35 lightning II is the seventh most widely operated fighter on the planet. This program began with nine nations involved in its development, but today its list of buyers has stretched all the way to 17.”
  • “In the past last few years, F-35s have accumulated some 773,000 hours in the sky spread out across 469,000 sorties.”
  • The F-35 had a troubled development cycle, but pilots love the finished product.
  • They “make older fourth generation fighters significantly more capable just by flying nearby, thanks to their incredible degree of sensor fusion and the data they can securely transmit to other aircraft flying in the vicinity.”
  • Myth #1: “All they do is crash.” “This is an excellent example of a combination of recency and availability biases. F-35s seem as though they crash often because there are so many of them in the sky on on any given day.”
  • “The truth is, the F-35 is actually the safest modern fighter ever developed. If you go back and look at the crash data of the F-35 during its first 12 years of service, as compared to the A-10, F-15, F-16 or F-22, you’ll find that the F-35 has a significantly better track record.”
  • “By this point in the A-10 service life, 9% of its airframes had already been lost in accidents. By this point in the F-16’s, that number was 13%. But today, the F-35’s loss rate is about 1%.”
  • Myth #2: “The F-35 is too expensive top operate.” “There really used to be something to this. As recently as 2016, it was reported that F-35s cost an average average of about $67,000 per hour to operate.”
  • The Air Force and Lockheed Martin have been driving this number down. By “2023, that operating cost had been reduced by more than 80%, down to right around $28,000 per hour. That’s only a little bit more than an F-15.”
  • Myth #3: “The F-35 can’t dogfight.” “First of all it probably shouldn’t. It was designed to operate like a sniper.”
  • “Most of the claims that say it can’t dogfight stem from a 2015 report published by War is Boring about an F-35a squaring off in a duel against a block 40 F-16d, and in that fight the F-16 definitely came out on top.” The problem is, the F-35 in that match was literally the second F-35 ever built.
  • “It didn’t have the vast majority of combat systems F-35s fly with today, including the helmet and electro-optical targeting system that allows F-35 pilots to target enemy aircraft without having to point the nose of the jet directly at them, as well as the F-35’s radar absorbance skin that would limit the F-16’s ability to get a radar lock on its opponent.”
  • “And to make matters even worse, that particular F-35 was flying with software restrictions on board that prevented the pilot from pushing the airframe too hard, limiting it to under 7g maneuvers, a restriction the F-16 obviously didn’t have.”
  • “The F-35 was forced to fly with both wings tied behind its back and it ended up losing against one of the most prolific dogfighters in history.”
  • “Most pilots say they’d still rather avoid that by taking out the enemy before they ever even know it’s.”
  • Myth #4: “The U.S. has already spent more than $1.7 trillion on the F-35.” That’s only the projected cost over the entire lifetime of the program.
  • Myth #5: “The F-35 has abysmal readiness rates.” There’s some truth to this, as readiness rates sit at 55%. But a big reason is the F-35 repair depot infrastructure hasn’t been fully built out yet. That’s supposed to be finished in 2027. “At which point the F-35’s readiness rates are expected to jump across the force to just about comparable with the F-15 and F-16.”
  • It’s not all roses: The F-35 has significant delays and cost overruns for the Tech Refresh 3 upgrade. “That will provide a 37-fold increase in onboard computing power 20 times the onboard data storage, and new double redundant display processors with five times the power to give the pilots far more situational awareness than ever before.”
  • “And Tech Refresh 3 is really just an appetizer that will lead to the Block 4 upgrade, which will be such a massive massive increase in capability that I have long argued the Block 4 F-35 deserves its own designation.”
  • “This new version of the F-35 will have a newer, even more advanced onboard radar that’s rumored to use Gallium Nitride transmit and receive modules that will dethrone the F-35’s current AN/AGP-81 radar as the most advanced and powerful radar ever affixed to a fighter.”
  • Plus new weapons and a bump from four to six internal weapons slots.
  • “Air Force secretary Frank Kendall has already stated plainly that in the future Block 4 F-35s will be flying with their own AI enabled drone wingmen, just like the sixth generation fighters in development today, Meaning the F-35 really will be a bridge to the sixth generation of fighter.” As in everything related to AI, the devil is in the details.
  • Like other modern fighter development programs, the F-35 has had its teething problems, but there’s no nation in the world that wants to face one in combat…

    LinkSwarm For January 12, 2024

    Friday, January 12th, 2024

    Superman gets tired of Iran’s catspaws tugging on his cape, the Biden Recession has both inflation and budget deficits soaring, another polar vortex barrels down on Texas, and the crazy-eyed girlfriend of a corrupt Democrat shows up on the Epstein list. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen just had to keep fucking around, so now they’ve found out.

    The U.S. and Britain launched air strikes in Yemen on Thursday in response to the Iran-backed Houthis’ recent attacks against vessels in the Red Sea.

    The strikes came hours after White House national-security spokesman John Kirby called on the Houthis to “stop these attacks” and warned that the group would “bear the consequences for any failure to do so.”

    The militants have launched 27 attacks on vessels in the Red Sea since November 19, the U.S. military said earlier on Thursday. The group says the attacks are in protest of the Israel–Hamas war.

    The retaliatory strikes targeted a source of the group’s attacks, Bloomberg News reported, noting that heavy explosions were seen in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa and the port city of Al Hudaydah. The attacks were carried out with support from Australia, the Netherlands, Bahrain, and Canada, while the U.K. contributed aircraft.

    President Biden confirmed the strikes in a statement on Thursday evening, explaining that the action was “in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea — including the use of anti-ship ballistic missiles for the first time in history.”

    “These attacks have endangered U.S. personnel, civilian mariners, and our partners, jeopardized trade, and threatened freedom of navigation,” he said, noting that more than 50 countries had been impacted by the attacks on commercial shipping, while crews from more than 20 countries have been threatened or taken hostage in acts of piracy.

    “More than 2,000 ships have been forced to divert thousands of miles to avoid the Red Sea — which can cause weeks of delays in product shipping times. And on January 9, Houthis launched their largest attack to date — directly targeting American ships,” Biden said.

    Suchomimus has taken a break from his Ukraine war work to do a video on the strike:

    Plus another one on the locations hit:

    Is there a Habitual Linecrosser video for this strike? Yes, yes there is:

  • The Biden Recession bites even deeper, with higher inflation and record food prices. And those are just the official numbers. Food inflation seems a hell of a lot higher than official numbers are letting on…
  • Plus the U.S. budget deficit soared 50% in December.
  • Trump prosecutor Fani Willis hired the married man she was committing adultery with to help prosecute Trump.

    Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis appointed a former romantic partner to lead the prosecution against the former president and his associates, a former Trump campaign official and co-defendant alleged in a court filing late Monday.

    “The district attorney and the special prosecutor have been seen in private together in and about the Atlanta area and believed to have co-habited in some form or fashion at a location owned by neither of them,” the court document submitted by Michael Roman’s legal representatives argues. Roman served briefly as a special assistant and researcher to President Trump.

    The submission does not offer any explicit proof of the DA’s connection to special prosecutor Nathan Wade, but instead claims “sources close to both the special prosecutor and the district attorney have confirmed they had an ongoing, personal relationship.” Wade was paid over half a million dollars throughout his involvement in the Trump election-interference case, which Willis has overseen and authorized.

    How long until the radical left argues that it’s perfectly normal with elected black female Democrats like Fani Willis and Kamala Harris to commit adultery with other Democrats to further their career, and it’s just those right-wing troglodytes who are hung up over it?

  • “Ex-girlfriend of disgraced NJ Sen. Bob Menendez took part in orgies with Jeffrey Epstein and victim Virginia Giuffre.” Before dropping one of those “that’s hot” comments, you might want to look Bob’s dirty, dirty girlfriend with her crazy, crazy eyes. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • And speaking of hoes, has feminism and “hoeflation” destroyed the west?

    It’s a problem in the western world that is rarely discussed in the media beyond puff-piece articles and glancing polls that avoid connecting the dots. The precipitous decline of dating, committed relationships and marriage along with a flatline in population in the past couple decades in the US is treated as a novelty issue rather than the threat to the stability of civilization that it actually is. History shows that without the traditional family structure, numerous ugly societal consequences follow.

    One could argue, though, that the situation is far worse than that. We may be heading into a future where families become a novelty, and many argue that the root cause is feminism and the hyperinflated delusions of progressive women.

    In order to understand the problem we have to look at the stats.

    More than 50% of American women are still childless by age 30. By age 35 fertility goes into steep decline with women having a 15% chance of becoming pregnant, and a less than 5% chance of motherhood at age 40. Meaning, the best window of opportunity for women to find a compatible partner and build a family is in their 20s.

    Feminists argue, though, that this is the time in a woman’s life when they should be building a career and having fun. Family life, they say, is an artificial prison “created by the patriarchy” in order to oppress the fairer sex. Corporate media and Hollywood entertainment often reinforce this narrative and encourage unrealistic life goals.

    The propaganda has generated what many refer to as the “Female Happiness Paradox.” Surveys show that increased power, job access and responsibility for women in society since the 1970s has also led to a diametrically opposed decline in overall happiness for those same women. The correlation suggests the exact opposite of what feminism originally promised and that the ideology has been a net negative.

    Though some will argue that a general decline in economic conditions is the real cause, surveys show that women have suffered a far more pronounced drop in happiness compared to men. Meaning, men were already acclimated to the struggles of the workaday world and their roles as providers and protectors. Women were happy until they joined men in the trenches.

    For men, the reaction has been to back away from the dating scene and the double standards involved. Over 63% of men under the age of 30 are now single; that’s up from 51% in 2019. The majority of single men say this is by choice and that they are seeking to avoid relationships altogether. Why? The consensus appears to be that modern western women cost too much money and cause too much trouble.

    Fear of failed marriage is one aspect that has the younger generation of men on edge, with family courts still largely in favor of women in divorce settlements and child custody. This is one reason why marriage rates have declined by 60% since the 1970s. However, the obstacles go well beyond divorce and into a new culture of female entitlement.

    The word on the street is “Hoeflation”: The dramatic increase in cost for men today to maintain a relationship with a woman while the quality of women continues to go down. That is to say, it is an increase in female expectations vs what they bring to the table in a relationship.

    In other words, women of the past used to have something to offer beyond sexual companionship, from greater femininity, greater potential for motherhood, less combativeness and narcissism, as well as a superior ability to raise children and maintain a home. Such traits are highly attractive to men even after 60 years of widespread feminism, but are seen as non-existent among women under 30 in 2023.

    It should be noted that “Hoeflation” seems to be directly linked to progressive influences, and not all women fall into this category. Unfortunately, around 71% of young women identify with progressive beliefs, as opposed to young men who are only 53% progressive. It should also be noted that progressive today means something a lot different from what it meant in the 1990s (progressive now means woke, or extreme leftist cultism).

  • Taiwan is having a presidential election.
  • Speaking of “too damn much foreign news this week,” Ecuador has exploded in a drug war.

    Terrified journalists being forced to kneel in a TV studio by gunmen pointing high-powered weapons at their heads as the cameras rolled, police officers pleading for their lives after being kidnapped on duty.

    The scenes which have unfolded in Ecuador show the extent to which this once peaceful haven in Latin America has descended into violence.

    Snip.

    Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, has ordered the armed forces to restore order in the country after days of unrest which saw two gang leaders escape from jail, prison guards held hostage, and explosive devices set off in a number of cities across the country.

    In the most dramatic attack, a group of armed men forced their way into the studios of TC Television in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, and tried to force one of the presenters to read out a message live on air.

    The gunmen were eventually overpowered by soldiers and have been arrested but the live footage of the stand-off between the hooded men and the armed forces while TC staff cowered on the floor has terrified Ecuadoreans.

  • “Ohio House Votes to Override DeWine’s Veto of Bill Banning Child Gender Medicalization.” An Ohio senate vote on overriding the veto is scheduled for January 24. Second Amendment victory: ” In Stunning About-Face, 9th Circuit Prohibits California from Banning Concealed Carry in Public Places.”

    From the court’s Order Granting Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction:

    California will not allow concealed carry permitholders to effectively practice what the Second Amendment promises. [The new law’s] coverage is sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court. The law designates twenty-six categories of places, such as hospitals, public transportation, places that sell liquor for on-site consumption, playgrounds, parks, casinos, stadiums, libraries, amusement parks, zoos, places of worship, and banks, as “sensitive places” where concealed carry permitholders cannot carry their handguns. SB2 turns nearly every public place in California into a “sensitive place,” effectively abolishing the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding and exceptionally qualified citizens to be armed and to defend themselves in public.

    Slowly but surely, Bruen is stopping the gun grabbers dead in their tracks.

  • “Director of ‘Bronx Rises Against Gun Violence,’ Caught With Illegal Guns, Sentenced To Prison…Michael Rodriguez, 49, the now-former director of “Bronx Rises Against Gun Violence” was sentenced to ten years in state prison following his arrest last summer on drug and gun charges.”
  • Rand Paul declares himself Never Nikki.
  • Our government in action: “Big Gov’t Raids Small Amish Farmer Who Refuses To Participate In The Industrial Meat/Milk Complex.”
  • “‘A Significant Shift’: Blue Collar Democrats Switching To Republican In ‘Deep Purple’ Pennsylvania.”

    Nearly 59,000 registered Pennsylvania Democrats left the party in 2023; that makes more voters than fans needed to fill the capacity of the Franklin Field Football Stadium at the University of Pennsylvania.

    Of those nearly 59,000 who left the Democratic Party, 36,950 switched to the Republican party, and 21,644 switched their party affiliation to “other,” the category the Pennsylvania Department of State uses in its data to cover parties such as Green and Libertarian.

    “As the Democrat Party tilts further to the progressive left, more historically traditional, working-class families are moving to the Republican Party, both in terms of how they vote and how they’re registered,” conservative political strategist Charlie Gerow told the Epoch Times.

    Faster, please.

  • That’s one reason why Democrats want to put an abortion referendum on the ballot in November to drive Democrat turnout. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Scary traffic controller incompetence via Instapundit:

    DTO is the airport for Denton, Texas, a college town northwest of Fort Worth.

  • “Georgia Tech researchers claim they have created ‘the world’s first functional semiconductor made from graphene.’ Importantly, the research team’s epitaxial graphene is claimed to be compatible with conventional microelectronics processing methods and is thus a realistic silicon alternative. Moreover, this refined material achieves a desirable band gap for electronics applications and has latent potential for future quantum computing devices.” Higher band gap is necessary for switching a circuit from on to off; it’s what puts the “semi” in “semiconductors.”
  • The upper Midwest needs to get ready for the cicadapocalypse.

    Billions of insects are predicted to burst out of the ground in the United States during late spring, in an event which hasn’t happened for more than 200 years.

    The red-eyed, winged insects called periodical cicadas, emerge in 13 to 17-year cycles and are completely harmless.

    In 2024, two of these groups – called Brood XIII (meaning 13) and Brood XIX (19) – are predicted to burst from the ground together for the first time since 1803.

    The US states of Wisconsin and Illinois will be mainly affected as billions of the bugs making a loud clicking noise will fill the air, cover branches, sign posts and pavements for about a month later this year.

    Interesting how the BBC feels it has to explain what Roman numerals mean…

  • “Three Austin Police Department (APD) SWAT officers have been cleared by a Travis County grand jury following a deadly shooting last year.” As well they should be. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Another day, another machete wielding lunatic keeping Austin weird. Steve Adler may be out of office, but his legacy lives on…
  • “Scooter injuries nearly tripled across the U.S. from 2016 to 2020, with a concurrent increase in severe injuries requiring orthopedic and plastic surgery over the same period.”
  • The Texans host a playoff game tomorrow after winning three games each in the previous two seasons. But ESPN hates rookie quarterback phenom C. J. Stroud giving all the glory to God.
  • Darth Hoodie leaves the Patriots. Plus…
  • Nick Saban retires. That’s a lot of turnover among legendary winners in one week…
  • Echo: “When it comes to casting roles like this, you usually have to choose between fighters who can’t act, or actors who can’t fight. But unfortunately, Alaqua Cox can’t seem to do either…Because she can’t speak, she really needs to sell the performance with her body language and facial expressions. The problem is, she doesn’t seem to have any.”
  • “Alabama man strips buck naked, cannonballs into Bass Pro Shop aquarium, knocks himself unconscious.”
  • “History Made As United Airlines Reveals First All-Dachshund Flight Crew.” It really would be an adorable way to die…
  • LinkSwarm For November 17, 2023

    Friday, November 17th, 2023

    Progressives kick Jews out of the club, San Francisco cleans up for a communist dictator (but not mere citizens), FBI busts a brothel catering to politicians…then refuses to divulge their clients, and The Marvels crashes and burns on opening weekend. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Jews Get Kicked Out of the Progressive Club.”

    To sustain the alliance between leftists and Islamists, something had to give. And that something was Jews.

    After a while, it became a parody worthy of classic comedy skits: the Biden administration’s reflexive need to launch into a condemnation of “Islamophobia” every time the discomfiting topic of antisemitism came up — which, you may have noticed, it does quite a bit these days.

    Progressives hate antisemitism. Not, unfortunately, the concept . . . the word. It holds a mirror up to their internal contradictions.

    Jews have been among the most consequential, cutting-edge progressives in history. A few months back, I reviewed Democratic Justice, Brad Snyder’s biography of Felix Frankfurter, who may have been as responsible for forging the dominance of American progressivism as Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president he zealously served. Alas, Frankfurter would not be welcome today in what’s become of his movement — not least because of another project on which he collaborated with his mentor and fellow Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis: Zionism. That project is anathema to today’s progressives. It honors the old order and the uniqueness of a people reified in their ancestral homeland, one in which they dwelled for millennia — before Islam existed and, 14 centuries later, the notion of “Palestinians” was conceived.

    Moreover, to highlight antisemitism is intolerably inconvenient to the collaboration of highest priority for modern progressives: Their partnership with sharia supremacists — so-called Islamists, adherents to “political Islam.”

    Snip.

    Ostensibly, it’s an unlikely partnership: Sharia supremacists despise many signal progressive causes — e.g., abortion, equality for women, civil rights for homosexuals, and “gender fluidity.” (How long do you figure the “activists” waving their “Queers for Palestine” placards would actually last in Gaza?) And it seems odd for progressives, infamously intolerant of religious liberty, to make common cause with unabashed theocrats who would impose on society a systematically discriminatory legal code enforced by barbaric punishments — of the terrorizing kind that, not coincidentally, the Brotherhood’s Hamas jihadists inflicted on Israeli men, women, and children on October 7.

    But let’s dig deeper. The ne plus ultra for sharia supremacists and leftists is the extirpation of the established order. Yes, they have very different ideas about what should replace that order; but that’s an argument for later (at which point progressives would find themselves in the unenviable position of the appeaser after the crocodile is done devouring everyone else). For now, it is a marriage of convenience, a joint war of conquest against Western civilization.
    Marriages of convenience are not big on commitment and loyalty. Hence, Jews — predominantly on the left, with legions of stalwart progressives who would as reflexively rebuke Islamophobia as any good Democrat — have become a casualty of that war.

    The sharia-supremacist hatred of Jews is doctrinal. As the Hamas Charter relates, Islamic eschatology is consumed by an end-of-times war in which even trees and stones will help Muslims kill their mortal enemies, the Jews. The Islamic claim on the land “from the River to the Sea” also stems from scripture: Mohammed’s night ride from Mecca to Jerusalem and on to heaven. And Muslim scripture further holds that Islam’s prophet died upon being poisoned to death by a Jewish woman.

    This is all very uncomfy for progressives. They really don’t do doctrine, let alone submit — or at least allow themselves to appear to be submitting — to religious doctrine. Thus must they engage in euphemistic games to sidestep reality.

  • “Democrat Media Arm Scrambles As It Becomes Clear They Knew About Hamas Invasion Of Israel Before It Happened. “Reports have been bubbling up that the various tentacles of the Democrat hacktivist media actually had pro-Hamas activists ‘journalists’ embedded with Hamas before and on October 7th.”
  • Democrats wouldn’t clean up San Francisco for mere citizens, but they did it for a communist dictator.

    Apparently, the city of San Francisco can indeed clear out the tent cities of homeless, remove the human feces and hypodermic needles from the sidewalks, and make the downtown look sparking clean and shiny in just a matter of days. All it takes is sufficient motivation — like hosting a visit from Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

    Even the New York Times can’t deny the irony that the arrival of Xi and a plethora of overseas leaders is spurring efforts that, presumably, could have been started and carried out at any point with enough motivation:

    On Market Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, maintenance workers resurfaced uneven sidewalks and installed plywood over empty tree wells.

    Nearby, a crew gave a long-derelict plaza a makeover by turning it into a skateboard park and outdoor cafe with ping-pong tables, chess boards and scores of potted plants. Elsewhere, workers painted decorative crosswalks and new murals, wiped away graffiti, picked up piles of trash and removed scaffolding to show off a refurbished clock tower at the Ferry Building. . . .

    Perhaps the most obvious change has been seen at the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building at the corner of Seventh and Mission Streets, less than a mile from the conference center.

    Before we go any further, can I just point out how infuriating it is that we live in a country with so many genuinely heroic, inspiring, and under-recognized figures, and yet we name things after politicians whose greatest achievements were bringing back a lot of federal funds to their constituents? I realize in the state of West Virginia, that statement is blasphemy.

    In a perfect irony, in August, “Officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advised hundreds of employees in San Francisco to work remotely for the foreseeable future due to public safety concerns outside the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building on Seventh Street.” As Iowa GOP senator Joni Ernst noticed, to protect the building named after the House speaker who said that border walls are “immoral,” federal officials put up a high chain-link fence.

    In other words, the official assessment of the federal government is that the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building is not a safe place for anyone, which strikes me as a heavy-handed metaphor.

    Anyway, back to the Xi-driven cleanup:

    For two years, a stubborn fentanyl market at the corner and a sprawling homeless encampment across the street became neighborhood fixtures. People regularly used drugs in an adjacent alley.

    Most have seemingly disappeared in a poof…

    It’s almost like the city government of San Francisco perceives Xi Jinping as the boss it needs to impress, instead of the voters whose exorbitant taxes (including an 8.625 percent sales tax!) pay city employees’ salaries. If the city is worth making safer, cleaner, and more attractive for a visit by Xi, President Biden, and a whole bunch of diplomats . . . why isn’t it worth making safer, cleaner, and more attractive for the full-time residents?

    Why indeed.

  • “Newsom Assures Homeless They Can Resume Pooping On Sidewalks Once His Boss Leaves.”
  • “Californians Set Up President Xi Dummy So Newsom Will Keep The Cities Clean All The Time.”
  • Thinks that make you go Hmmmm: “DOJ Protects D.C. Brothel Customers… As Congress Votes For New FBI Facility.”

    Two tightly connected things happened in Washington, D.C., on November 8: a “high-end” brothel serving “elected officials” was shut down by the FBI, and the U.S. House approved a controversial $300 million new headquarters building for the weaponized agency.

    In announcing the brothel’s bust, the Department of Justice explained that the sex-trafficking operation served “elected officials, high tech and pharmaceutical executives, doctors, military officers, government contractors that possess security clearances, professors, attorneys, scientists and accountants, among others.”

    The press release named the brothel operators: Han “Hana” Lee, 41, of Cambridge, MA; James Lee, 68, of Torrance, CA; and Junmyung Lee, 30, of Dedham, MA.

    In lurid detail, the Department of Justice explained how the operators advertised their services—primarily young Asian women—for high-end customers. In order to utilize the prostitution services of the brothel, prospective clients allegedly completed “a form providing their full names, email address, phone number, employer and reference if they had one.”

    Not mentioned in the press release were the names of the customers.

    The announcement was made just ahead of a vote in the U.S. House, which would have defunded the $300 million new headquarters building proposed for the FBI. The facility, to be built in Maryland, will reportedly be larger than the Pentagon. The Pentagon has a total floor area of 6.5 million square feet and offices 23,000 military and civilian employees.

  • Dispatches from the Biden Recession: “Stellantis offers buyouts to roughly half of U.S. salaried workers.” Stellantis consumed the corpse of Chrysler several years back.
  • “Taibbi: According To Pundits, ‘Ignorance’ Makes Americans Give “Wrong” Answers To Economic Confidence…The Guardian editorial Krugman linked to explains: Americans continue to believe the economy sucks, even though they’ve been told over and over it doesn’t! Why won’t they listen?…I can’t remember an instance of newspapers polling Americans about their feelings, then telling them their answers are not only wrong, but ignorant!
  • “Pro-Palestinian” protestors are anti-American protestors:

    (Hat tip: The Daily Gator https://thedaleygator.net/?p=25316 )

  • Gaza kids say the darndest things…about killing Jews. “I want to stab them again and again.”
  • Speaking of which, what better accessory is there for a little girls room than a cache of rocket launchers?
  • Tim Scott is out. Like so many in this presidential campaign cycle, he made himself less, not more, electable by taking the wrong side in the culture war.
  • Texas Republican congressman Michael Burgess will not seek reelection.
  • This is a weird story: “Congressman Pat Fallon (R-TX-4), who had filed to run for Texas Senate District (SD) 30, has now backed out and will instead run for re-election to his currently held congressional seat.” Being a state senator is all well and good, but who steps down from a U.S. Congressional seat to a state senate seat?
  • Austin police officer Jorge Pastore was killed in the line of duty early Saturday morning.
  • “Texas: Islamic scholar praises Gazans for having ‘thrown horror’ in the hearts of the Israelis.” That would be Mohamad Baajour of the East Plano Islamic Center.
  • Another week, another liberal journalist charged with child pornography.

    A BuzzFeed feature story from 2018 about a journalist who told a group of schoolchildren that he was gay was taken down just a day after it was announced that he had been brought up on child pornography charges.

    Slade Sohmer, 44, the former editor-in-chief of the left-leaning video-driven news site The Recount, was freed on $100,000 bail on Monday after he was charged in Massachusetts court with possessing and disseminating “hundreds of child pornography images and videos.”

    He has pleaded not guilty to two counts of possession of child pornography and two counts of dissemination of child pornography.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

  • “Germany’s Rheinmetall to supply Ukraine with 25 Leopard-1 tanks.”
  • Asianometry takes a deep dive into Nvidia’s radical new computational lithography method for generating semiconductor masks. I know a whole lot of eyes just glazed over, but this stuff is important, and I don’t think any other bloggers are covering semiconductors. And speaking of eyes…
  • World’s first whole eyeball transplant performed. No vision yet, but doctors are hopeful.
  • Rosalynn Carter joins her husband in hospice care.
  • Texas A&M head football coach Jimbo Fisher just got paid $77 million to go away. Nice work if you can get it…
  • The Marvels officially has the worst opening weekend of any MCU film. Yes, worse than the Ed Norton Hulk.
  • Speaking of disasterous superhero films, Critical Drinker goes over the compounding errors of the never-to-be-released Batgirl movie. Surprisingly, the film itself was reportedly not that bad, it’s just a cascading series of studio decisions made the film nonviable.
  • Snoop Dogg says he’s giving up weed. And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
  • A tale of two Halloween lights.
  • “Hamas Says All The AK-47s Found In Gaza Hospital Were Strictly For Medicinal Use.”
  • “Thousands Already Lined Up For Black Friday After Grocery Store Offers Prices From When Trump Was President.”
  • Ukraine Drone Hits Russian Fab

    Thursday, September 7th, 2023

    I missed this bit of news from late August.

    A Russian microchip factory likely producing technology for sophisticated weapons has been targeted in a significant strike, Daily Express US has heard.

    A drone downed over the Bryansk region in Russia this week fell on the Kremny EL factory, dubbed “Silicon El”, according to the Mash Telegram channel.

    Military blogger Romanov Light said a fire broke out at the plant’s 16th building and was extinguished around an hour later – at 1.50am local time. Staggering footage shared online shows the shocking moment the plant was struck.

    Michael Bociurkiw, global affairs analyst and senior fellow at The Atlantic Council, told Daily Express US the microchip factory was a significant target.

    It was one of several Russian sites struck in one of the biggest waves of attacks on Russian soil since Putin’s illegal war began.

    According to Wikipedia’s vaguely accurate list of semiconductor fabs around the world, Kremny EL was running a 500 nm process, which was state of the art…in 1987. This clearly translated from something that’s not English, they seemed to originally be running power supply chips. Lots of military applications for those, and not too demanding as far as chip design goes.

    So it was a military target. Could they use it for smart weapon guidance systems? Yeah, you could build something as powerful as, say, a 386 on it, and that’s plenty sophisticated enough to guide bombs and missiles with.

    How long will the strike set Russia back? Hard to say, but the contamination means the entire fab will need to be decontaminated before they can process wafers again. Maybe a month. Debris may have damaged some of the machines, though the tech is so old that there are probably lots of spare parts for things that can be had despite sanctions. If they hit the power center, the air-handling system, or the DI water system, that could take a while to repair, especially if they need modern western parts. And if they took out the power, all the wafer processing machines will have to be requalified, which is a gigantic pain in the ass and quite time-consuming. But most of the in-process wafers will be safe inside FOUPs, and can probably continue processing, once the fab is up and running again.

    Still, it will be a setback for Russia. It’s just unclear how large a setback.

    LinkSwarm for July 21, 2022

    Friday, July 21st, 2023

    More Biden corruption, a bit about music, and cute dogs. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Here’s a fairly extensive timeline of Biden corruption.

    2009 – The Obama-Biden administration takes office

    November 1, 2013 – China / BHR:

    Hunter Biden, business associate, and Chinese investors agree to create Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd. (BHR), an investment fund controlled by the Bank of China, to focus on mergers and acquisitions, and investment in and reforms of state-owned enterprise.

    December 4, 2013 – China / BHR

    Vice President Biden travels with Hunter Biden on Air Force 2 to China and meets CEO of BHR, Jonathan Li. Shortly thereafter, BHR’s business license was approved and Hunter Biden was a board member.

    February 5, 2014 – Kazakhstan

    Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakhstani businessman, meets with Hunter Biden at a hotel in Washington, D.C.

    April 15, 2014 – Ukraine

    Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, appoints Biden business associate to their board of directors.

    Etc. etc. etc.

  • “California Democrats retreat on their effort to defend child slavers.”

    After initially killing a bill on July 12, 2023 that would have increased the penalties on child sex traffickers, the Democrats who completely control the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee reversed course one day later and voted to advance the bill.

    With a final vote of 6-0, including two abstentions from progressive Democrats, the bill now moves to the Appropriations Committee, after which, if it is approved, can move the bill to be voted upon by the entire State Assembly. If passed, SB 14 will make trafficking of minors a serious felony that would qualify under California’s three strikes law, which keeps dangerous, serial criminals off the streets, and make individuals convicted of the crime ineligible for early release.

    I highlight the two abstentions by Democrats. Even after a nationwide uproar over their willingness to block harsh penalties on those who traffic young children for sexual slavery, these two Democrats, including Assembly Majority Leader Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), still could not bring themselves to vote for the bill.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • State Senator Charles Schwertner (my state senator) has his DWI charges dismissed. Still, he hardly crowned himself in glory. At least he didn’t yell “Call Greg!” (It did make me wonder what Rosemary Lehmberg is doing today, and if she ever conquered her alcoholism…)
  • Mexico surpasses China as America’s biggest trade partner. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Remember Toast Tab’s 99¢ fee from last week’s LinkSwarm? Well, public reaction was so negative that their shares cratered and they rescinded the fee.
  • Will the Biden Administration use a lizard to kill the Permian Basin shale revolution?
  • “This car has all the annoying things about EVs and none of the cool stuff…this car doesn’t live up to any expectations. Nothing
    works.

  • TSMC delays Arizona plant opening due to labor shortage.
  • A detailed look at the recording of one of my favorite albums of all time: Peter Gabriel III.
  • Just what does electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples of the Moon” sound like? You know that scene in a 70s SciFi dystopia where someone’s face gets ripped off to reveal they’re a robot? It sounds like that.
  • GWAR plays for NPR. So on one side you have horrible monsters who are unbearable to listen to, and on the other side you have GWAR…
  • That’s one sly kissing bandit.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • LinkSwarm for March 31, 2023

    Friday, March 31st, 2023

    One quarter of the year gone! Career criminals coddled by Soros Stooges, crazy woman who thinks she’s a man murders children, lots of Flu Manchu fraud, and Botox makes you crazy(er). It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Everyone and their dog is covering the ham sandwich Trump indictment, so I’ll leave that to others. I will note that Alan Dershowitz is not impressed. “Based on what we know about this case, it may be one of the weakest cases in my six years of experience.”
    

  • Voter Suppression Is Real And It’s Not What You Were Told.

    On the morning of Election Day last November, William French went to his local polling place in Freeland, Pennsylvania, to cast his vote. But the qualified and registered voter wasn’t allowed to. The disabled U.S. Army veteran was told that the precinct had run out of paper for ballots and he had to come back later in the afternoon.

    So that’s what he did, returning at 3:30 p.m. But the precinct still didn’t have ballots. Election workers told him to return yet again. But by nightfall, it was too difficult. French has endured 17 surgeries on his destroyed leg and uses a cane to walk. But the sidewalks are a mess, and he was worried about the risk of falling and further injury.

    That same morning, Melynda Reese and her husband went to their polling location in Shickshinny, Pennsylvania. But only Reese’s husband was allowed to vote, and for the same reason: The precinct had run out of paper. They came back at 4:00 p.m. and were told there would be a lengthy wait.

    Reese is a corrections officer and her husband’s primary caregiver. He had recently suffered two cardiac arrests and a stroke. He required regular medication and attention and couldn’t be left alone. Long waits were also too much to bear. The couple returned at 6:30 p.m., and saw a line that stretched so long that they knew they couldn’t wait. Around 9:15 p.m., an election official called Reese and told her that ballots were finally available and she could vote. But her husband had just taken his sleeping pills and she couldn’t leave him unattended.

    French and Reese are just two of the thousands of voters affected by poor election administration in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The two just sued Luzerne County, its Board of Elections and Registration, and its Bureau of Elections in federal court for violations of their constitutional right to vote.

    “Voters in Luzerne County through no fault of their own, were disenfranchised and denied the fundamental right to vote. William French and Melynda Reese are two of those voters. They bring suit to vindicate the denial of their sacred right to vote, to make sure voters are not disenfranchised in the future, and to bring integrity back to elections in Luzerne County,” said Wally Zimolong, lawyer for French and Reese.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Did the FBI have a “mole” that would tip Hunter Biden off about any China probes.

    The House Oversight Committee is investigating the explosive claims by Dr. Gal Luft, a former Israel Defense Forces lieutenant colonel with deep intelligence ties in Washington and Beijing, who says he was arrested to stop him from revealing what he knows about the Biden family and FBI corruption — details he told the Department of Justice in 2019, which he says it ignored.

    Luft, 56, first made the claims on Feb. 18 on Twitter, after being detained at a Cyprus airport as he prepared to board a plane to Israel.

    “I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the U.S. The U.S., claiming I’m an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. I’ve never been an arms dealer.

    “DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim, and Hunter Biden.

    “Shall I name names?”

    Luft remains in jail awaiting extradition to the US over what he says are trumped-up charges of arms trafficking to China and Libya, and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

    Luft claimed that he tried to reach out to the DOJ about the Chinese energy company CEFC paying Hunter $100,000 and James Biden, Joe’s brother, $65,000 “in exchange for their FBI connections and use of the Biden name to promote China’s Belt and Road Initiative around the world.”

    Maybe. Could just be a grifter trying to skate.

  • “James O’Keefe Uncovers Possible Lucrative Money-Laundering Scheme for Dems.”

    James O’Keefe has not allowed his forced exit from Project Veritas to stop him. His new journalism outfit, O’Keefe Media Group (OMG), just released a video uncovering evidence of what O’Keefe calls a possible “money-laundering scheme” for the Democrats. Some individuals reportedly appear to have donated thousands of times over a relatively short period to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars to ActBlue and Biden for President, based on Federal Election Commission records.

    “FEC data shows that some senior citizens across the U.S. have been donating thousands of times per year,” O’Keefe began. “Some of these individuals’ names and addresses are attached to over $200,000 in contributions. We went and knocked on a few of their doors to corroborate the data that we received from a group of citizen journalists called Election Watch in Maryland.” The video then showed O’Keefe visiting someone who is listed as donating over $217,000, through 12,000 separate contributions. This money was earmarked for various entities through leftist platform ActBlue over three years’ time. Some of the donations were made with variations of the person’s name and address, O’Keefe stated.

    The data he obtained was state and FEC data, O’Keefe said. “We’re wondering if these donors are victims of what appears to be a money-laundering scheme, or [if] these residents actually participated in the scheme. We’re making phone calls, we’re knocking on doors, these are things that you can do, we hope you do that.” There are “bizarre amounts of data” on homes and individuals making many thousands of dollars of donations, O’Keefe said, urging others to help him investigate.

    The first person shown opening the door to O’Keefe, a Marylander listed as donating $32,000 in 3,000 different contributions, said he was unaware of the donations but advised O’Keefe as a solution to hit Donald Trump “with a bat.” The man added, “I want to see a scar on his f**king head. Now stop f**king with me,” and slammed the door.

    Another donor, Cindy, according to O’Keefe, supposedly donated over $18,000 in 1,000+ donations to ActBlue in 2022, which would necessitate donating “three times a day, every day, for the whole year.” When asked if she’d donated over $18,000, Cindy responded with a quick laugh, “I doubt that. No, I don’t think so… I wish I could have donated $18,000 to Biden’s presidency.”

    Meanwhile Carolyn Lenz, in Tucson, Ariz., told OMG that she “absolutely [did] not” donate over 18,000 times for $170,000+ to ActBlue. She looked at the data showing “she” donated multiple times a day, often in $5 to $15 increments, and insisted that the donations were not hers. “They must be” fraudulent, Lenz said.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Judge stops California Soros prosecutor from slashing triple murderer’s sentence.”

    After rejecting her in 2018, the voters of Alameda County, California selected Pamela Price as their new District Attorney last year. Price had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from George Soros for her two campaigns. That probably tells you most of what you need to know, since Soros only funds candidates who are soft on crime and willing to empty the jails as much as possible. Price quickly proved herself no exception, seeking to cut a plea deal with a killer who had been arrested for one triple murder for hire, was accused in the murder of a court witness, and several other violent crimes. Rather than the 75 years to life sentence that Delonzo Logwood was eligible for, Price wanted to cut him loose after fifteen years. Thankfully, a County District Judge stepped in and rejected the deal out of hand. (Free Beacon)

    A California judge this week blocked a newly-elected progressive prosecutor’s effort to slash a triple murderer’s sentence.

    Alameda County district judge Mark McCannon rejected District Attorney Pamela Price’s plea deal for a 31-year-old man jailed for a 2008 triple murder-for-hire, among other crimes. Price, who took office in November and has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the progressive billionaire George Soros, attempted to sentence Delonzo Logwood to just 15 years in prison, though he was eligible for a sentence of 75 years to life.

  • 10 Arrests, 33 Charges, 31 Days — One Man!

    You can’t keep a bad man down. Keith Chastain, 38, is a one-thug crime spree.

    Chastain racked up an impressive array of arrests in Fresno County, California, (of course). Between Feb. 19 and March 21, he was arrested 10 times for a menagerie of crimes encompassing 15 misdemeanors and 18 felonies, including:

    • six stolen cars
    • fraud
    • DUI (duh)
    • drugs (duh)
    • vandalism

    Chastain was hit with three additional charges — DUI, trespassing, and auto theft — but those were dropped when cops failed to file the charges in time.

    Snip.

    “Unfortunately, this is not as unique of a situation as it seems,” Tony Botti, spokesman for the Fresno County Sherriff’s office, stated. “California has watered down the laws so much over the years for property criminals and repeat offenders that they are not held accountable like they should be. Sadly, it is our community members who suffer due to these soft-on-crime policies.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Aggravated robbery defendant violates bond conditions more than 1,000 times, gets rewarded by two judges.”

    According to court documents, Edwin Maldonado spent many months thumbing his nose at what he was ordered by the court to do.

    His punishment for that is more like a prize.

    “You’ve got someone who was rewarded for being a failure, and this guy was a failure over 1,000 and some odd times,” said Andy Kahan with Crime Stoppers.

    First, Maldonado gets a felony charge for drug possession. A few weeks later, he’s charged with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. He makes his $30,000 bond and walks out of jail.

    “I’ve certainly had clients hauled back into court on violations, maybe two or three times that have been alleged,” said criminal defense attorney Emily Detoto.

    Associate Judge Tiffany Hill presided over a bond revocation hearing for Maldonado.

    “For obvious reasons, you are not abiding by your rules and conditions period, and God knows what he was doing when he wasn’t where he was supposed to be,” Kahan said.

    According to court documents, Maldonado failed to comply with any of his bond conditions for eight months.

    According to his GPS monitor, he left his curfew zone 847 times, was called 453 times about his whereabouts, and had more than 1,000 GPS monitor violations.

  • “Suspect Charged in Robbery that Paralyzed Victim Was Out on $100 Bond for Weapons Charge.”

    A suspect arrested and charged in a recent brutal “jugging” robbery in Houston that left a woman paralyzed was out on a $100 bond for a weapons-related charge.

    On the morning of February 13, Nung Truong, 44, withdrew money from a bank ATM but was followed for approximately 24 miles by two suspects. Surveillance video released by the Houston Police Department shows a black male bumping into Truong and causing her to drop her belongings. The suspect initially fled with an envelope but returned seconds later to body-slam Truong to the ground before taking $4,300 in cash.

    A mother to three children aged 13, 15, and 20, Truong is now paralyzed and unable to walk or care for herself.

    Last Friday, Houston Police arrested Joseph Harrell, 17, and Zy’Nika Ayesha Woods, 19, for the attack and charged both suspects with Aggravated Robbery with Serious Bodily Injury.

    According to court records, on January 26, 2023, Harrell had been granted a General Order bond of $100 for Unlawful Possession of a Weapon. He also faces charges of Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon related to an incident in February in which he threatened another victim with a gun. Harrell is currently being held in the Harris County jail on bonds totaling $240,000.

    Snip.

    Although Harrell’s Unlawful Possession of a Weapon charge was assigned to Harris County Court 2 under Judge Paula Goodhart, his bond was signed by Judge David Singer.

    Elected to Harris County Criminal Court 14 in 2018, Singer lost in the March 2022 Democratic primary election and his term ended December 31, 2022. As a one-term judge, Singer is not eligible under state code to serve as a visiting judge.

    The 11th Administrative Judicial Region confirmed to The Texan that Singer is not listed as a visiting judge.

    The Harris County Office of Court Management emailed the following statements to The Texan:

    “David Singer was appointed as associate judge pursuant to Section 54A.002 of the Texas Government Code and the Local Rules for Harris County Criminal Courts at Law. His start date was Jan. 1, 2023.”

  • Finland gets the green light to join NATO, with Turkey and Hungary approving their membership. Sweden’s application is still under negotiation. As I noted previously, tangling with the Finns has not been a source of happiness for Russia.
  • Poor priorities. “European Ammo Maker’s Growth Stymied By TikTok Data Center Sucking Up Electricity.”
  • “Several homeless encampments have popped up behind shops at South Town Square in South Austin, driving business and customers away.”
  • “Florida Governor DeSantis Signs Universal School Choice Bill.”
  • LA City Council member Mark Ridley-Thomas convicted of taking bribes. “He was convicted of one count of bribery, one of conspiracy, one count of honest services mail fraud, and four counts of honest services wire fraud. The jury acquitted him on 12 other counts.”
  • “Protesting WA’s capital gains tax, Fisher Investments says HQ moving to Texas.” This is in response to a Washington state supreme court ruling allowing a state capital gains tax.
  • Crazy woman who thinks she’s a man murdered children in a Christian school this week.
  • “As Veterans Learned the DCCC Had Leaked Their Data, the VA’s Tech Chief Was Meeting With His Wife. She Runs the DCCC.”

    Veterans Affairs assistant secretary Kurt DelBene is married to Rep. Suzan DelBene (Wash.), chairwoman of the DCCC. It’s a big club, and you’re not in it. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Covid crook convicted.

    Federal prosecutors announced a 58-year-old Plainview man is facing 102 years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing $4 million in federal relief funds passed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    On Friday, Andrew Johnson pleaded guilty in the Northern District of Texas to three counts of bank fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity, according to a news release published by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

    Johnson swindled millions from the Paycheck Protection Program passed in the early weeks of the pandemic to help stave off the economic effects of business closures, government restrictions, and shelter-in-place mandates. As part of the fraud, Johnson applied for and received forgiveness for 27 bogus loans.

    He spent more than $3.5 million of the stolen funds on “home renovations, vacations, clothing, cosmetic surgery, college tuition, cars, wedding expenses, and equipment for an unrelated business venture,” according to the DOJ.

  • Speaking of fraud: “Nonprofit vendor defrauded Austin Public Health of $417K.”

    After an investigation that took longer than a year, the Office of the City Auditor in Austin said it found Central Texas Allied Health Institute (CTAHI), a nonprofit City of Austin contractor, committed fraud against Austin Public Health and falsified health records.

    According to the investigative report, CTAHI misrepresented over $1.1 million in financial transactions across three contracts with Austin Public Health and was incorrectly paid roughly $417,000 between December 2020 and September 2021 because of fraudulent contract claims. The report also claimed CTAHI falsified its COVID-19 vaccine contract performance by overstating vaccination totals and fabricating patient data.

    “This is up there with some of the biggest cases we’ve investigated on my team,” said Brian Molloy, chief of investigations at the Chief of the City Auditor.

    CTAHI, President Todd Hamilton, and Dr. Jereka Thomas-Hockaday — both of whom were named in the report — denied the claims made in the report in a statement Thursday.

    Snip.

    CTAHI’s three contracts with Austin Public Health were for COVID-19 testing, workforce development, and COVID-19 vaccines, according to the city. Between December 2020 and September 2021, the city said CTAHI submitted 23 claims for reimbursement to APH under the workforce development and COVID-19 vaccine contracts.

    Flu Manchu is the fraud fount that just keeps giving… (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • NHL might stop pushing gay pride after backlash from players and fans. “Philadelphia Flyer’s player Ivan Provorov didn’t want to participate in a ‘Pride’ event during warmups…Soon, other players also refused to participate after Povorov showed it could be done, and some entire team organizations dropped their planned LGBT pride events. And thanks to this one man’s stand, the NHL is considering dropping the whole ‘Pride’ push.”
  • Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel and coiner of Moore’s Law, is dead at age 94. Semiconductors have radically changed just about every facet of the world.
  • Italy refuses to eat the bugs.
  • Botox alters brain activity connected to emotions.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Samsung phones fake moon photos.
  • An aperiodic monotile exists!
  • “This woman was visiting Asia and noticed that all the plus-sized clothing stores have very direct names.”
  • “Progressives Across Nation Locked Out Of Accounts After CAPTCHA Asks ‘Select All Squares That Contain A Woman.'”
  • “Media Calls For Moment Of Silence For Shooter Who Was Misgendered.”
  • India’s Semiconductor Push: More Smoke Than Fire

    Wednesday, February 8th, 2023

    India has been trying to get into semiconductor fabrication for a while now, and after announcing a $10 billion investment fund, and with China locked out of so much semiconductor technology, there have been a lot of news bubbling up, but I want to focus on the Foxconn/Vedanta fab project.

    The Economic Times is reporting that Foxconn and Vedanta are seeking to bring in European chipmaker STMicroelectronics as their technology partner in their proposed India manufacturing unit. The two companies announced their joint venture February 2021, with Foxconn as lead partner. Vedanta are reportedly seeking to onboard a CXO to head their semiconductor business.

    Snip.

    Vedanta-Foxconn are set to finalize a location for their facility in the next few weeks. The consortium are reportedly seeking a 800-1000 acre land parcel that is also well connected with Ahmedabad. The Gujarat government, as of media reports on September 16, showing sites at Sanand and Mandal-Becharaji in Ahmedabad district, two locations near Vadodara in central Gujarat, Dholera, Himmatnagar, Jamnagar, and Kutch. The plant has to be located at a distance from national and state highways so to cut off any vibration from heavy traffic movement. Further, no other major industry should be located in its vicinity.

    Vedanta and Foxconn, in a 60-40 joint venture, will be setting up India’s first semiconductor production plant, a display fab unit, and a semiconductor assembling and testing unit over 1000 acres in Ahmedabad, state of Gujarat. The plant will begin production in two years as Foxconn plays the role of technical partner while Vedanta provides financial backing. The investment is worth over INR 1.54 trillion (approx. US$20 billion) and semiconductor manufacturing will be carried out by the holding company, Volcan Investments Limited.

    Foxconn is a serious tech player that has serious mastery over the value-added chain. $20 billion, assuming it actually materializes, is real money, even in semiconductors. It’s right around the threshold to build a state of the art sub-10nm fab, even though it’s apparent that that’s not what they’re aiming for.

    Vedanta, on the other hand, is another matter. They’re “a globally diversified natural resources company. We extract and process minerals, oil and gas.” Yeah, a natural resources company generally isn’t who you want running your fabs. Another strike is their talking about “Net Zero Carbon by 2050,” which suggests they may have their fingers in political scam pies.

    STMicroelectronics is a real chipmaker that runs real fabs, but not the first company I would turn toward to purchase cutting edge process technology from, nor even the tenth. The fact that STM has already announced plans to team up with Global Foundries to build a new 300mm fab next to their existing fab line in Crolles, France in June 2022 makes me even more suspicious. Information on that existing 300mm Crolles fab is sketchy, and I know that for a long time it was a pilot rather than a production line, and I can see no evidence that it was ever expanded to volume production.

    The fact that they plan to set set up a fab, a display fab, and a slice-and-dice packaging facility suggest a certain lack of focus. Flat Panel Display (FPD) fabs use familiar semiconductor steps, but the machines are very different because the substrates are different, and Samsung has huge dedicated display fabs. It’s setting up a modern chip fabrication plant that’s the difficult part, and while this combination could probably put together a solid trailing edge fab, like Bosch’s new 65nm fab. But that only cost $1.2B. Maybe they plan to build something in the 20-10nm range.

    “The plant will begin production in two years.” Yeah, that’s not happening. Even giant players like TSMC and Intel generally take 2.5-3 years to stand up a new fab from breaking ground to starting up the line.

    This could still happen, but the details are very sketchy. The slice and dice operation could be set up without too much difficulty, but it’s a low volume, low tech spinoff operation. A display fab would be more difficult, but it’s doable, though again, probably not in two years. But a real 300mm wafer, sub-65mn node microchip fabrication plant in India? I don’t see this set of players carrying that off well in three years. Five sounds more realistic, and that’s assuming the deal doesn’t fall apart.

    Other India semiconductor plays sound even more nebulous.

    Taiwan’s TSMC is also looking to set up a chip-fabricating factory in India, and is currently speaking to various government agencies to check the viability of setting up factory in India. TSMC already has one of its largest offices outside of Taiwan in India in Bengaluru, Karnataka, from where it provides support to its’ existing customers in Asia, Europe and North America and supports and encourages fabless companies in India in design and growth.

    Ever since news N Chandrasekaran – chairman of the Tata group, announced that Tata Electronics (TEPL) will set up an Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT) facility in India, there has a been a lot of speculation, according to which, TSMC and Tata may enter into a partnership.

    Besides TSMC, Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, a Taiwanese chipmaker, is also in exploratory negotiations with several Indian companies to help establish new chip operations in the country, as per a report by Taipei Times. According to the newspaper, the memory chip maker’s announcement put an end to six months of speculation that it was planning to invest in India to diversify its operations despite Taiwan’s rising geopolitical tensions.

    “Speaking to,” “exploring plans,” etc. These are very wishy-washy terms. Powerchip is a memory manufacturer that’s hardly flush with cash. I’m sure TSMC is talking to a lot of countries about fabs, but their newest one is under construction in Arizona.

    International Semiconductor Consortium (ISMC), a joint venture between UAE’s Next Orbit Ventures and Israel’s Tower Semiconductor, was supposed to spend $3 billion to get started on a 40-65nm analog fab right about now, but I don’t see signs that’s actually happened. Tower is a real foundry, and the $3 billion pricetag and 4-5 year timeline seems realistic, but I’m not 100% sure they’re still interested in the project after Intel announced plans to buy them about a year ago. And having to bring in Arab petrostate funding for your venture is seldom a sign of strong financial viability.

    There’s no reason you can’t build one or more modern fabs in India, but so far no major chip manufacturer has chosen to do so, despite the availability of $10 million in government subsidies.

    Japan, The Netherlands Join China Semiconductor Ban

    Tuesday, January 31st, 2023

    Japan and The Netherlands have evidently decided to sign onto the Chinese semiconductor ban.

    The talks between the US, Japan, and the Netherlands over wider bans on exports of semiconductor technology to China have reportedly seen the three agree to concerted action.

    As The Register has often chronicled, the US has restricted exports of critical chipmaking and silicon technologies to China, hoping to prevent its economic and strategic rival from developing military technologies – and to protest human rights abuses.

    While the Home of the Brave has spawned many of Earth’s most significant chipmakers and designers – Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and many others have headquarters stateside – other nations also export semiconductor tech to China. The Land of the Free would rather put a stop to that if possible.

    The Biden Administration also recognizes that its bans could be seen as creating an opportunity for other nations to cash in on the absence of US vendors in the Chinese market. The three-nation talks therefore have the extra dimension of making sure America’s policies have their desired effect against China and don’t harm the home team.

    Those twin desires saw Japan and the Netherlands in talks with the US last week, and according to numerous reports the meetings produced a unified approach to restrict semiconductor exports to China.

    Without equipment from the US, Japan and The Netherlands, you can’t equip and run a modern semiconductor fabrication plant.

    Peter Zeihan (him again), who has evidently lost a bet requiring him to dress as Gimli, discusses the ramifications.

    This is one case where Zeihan gets the generalities right, but is wrong on some specifics.

  • Right: The idea that China can just forge a complete “alternative” semiconductor supply chain out of thin air to replace western alternatives is indeed “hideously wrong.” “The nature of the semiconductor industry is more of an ecosystem. There are there’s very few places that without, significant industrial build out, could even pretend to do more than two or three steps of it, much less than a dozen or so steps that are necessary.”
  • However, in conflating semiconductor manufacturing and semiconductor equipment manufacturing (possibly to avoid contracting hypothermia) he’s muddied things up a bit. There are five essential semiconductor equipment manufacturers:
    • Applied Materials (USA)
    • ASML (The Netherlands)
    • KLA (USA)
    • LAM Research (USA)
    • Tokyo Electron (Japan)

    If you’re building a modern, sub-10nm fab, chances are pretty good you need all five. You have to have an ASML EUV stepper, or else you have to go with trailing-edge machines from Canon and Nikon and deal with the computational pain and complexity of self-aligned quadruple patterning. You need KLA inspection tools to raise and maintain yields, and you need, at the very least, one of AMAT, LAM or TEL to provide the rest. Take away all three and you can’t equip a fab, period.

  • “We now have an agreement, and very soon the Dutch will formally be joining the sanction system against the Chinese.”
  • “The best [chips], these are 10 nanometer and smaller. This is typically what’s in your cell phone or in your high-end computers and servers those about 80% percent of them are actually fabricated in Taiwan, with another 20% in South Korea.” No. Although TSMC and Samsung are indeed leaders in this space, Intel has had 10nm processes running in their advanced fabs is Hillsboro and Chandler for a while, even though they’ve suffered yield problems.
  • His assertion that only China does legacy 90nm and above processes is false, as a look at this list of wafer fabs will attest, as there are a lot of companies (TI, TowerJazz, Oki, Mitsubishi, etc.) still profitably running older nodes, though many are comparatively funky technologies like BiCMOS, Analog, GaAs, etc.
  • Some quibbles about the details, but he gets the big picture right.

    As for his suggestion that companies stick to over 10nm nodes, well, I don’t think much of it. Those that can do >10nm nodes will and push the technology forward, and those that can’t afford to won’t…

    LinkSwarm For January 27, 2023

    Friday, January 27th, 2023

    Democrats enabling sexual predators (yet again), more tanks for Ukraine information, and the unexpected return of Storm Drain Woman. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • Democrat-run California loves releasing pedophiles from prison early.

    Published in November of 2022, the story indicated “thousands of child molesters are being let out after just a few months, despite sentencing guidelines.”

    The story reported that more than 7,000 inmates convicted of “lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 years of age” were released from prison the same year they were incarcerated.

    The Daily Mail’s analysis was conducted using a database—created in 1994 after the federal Megan’s Law was passed—requiring law enforcement to make public information regarding registered sex offenders. The news organization examined data in California through July of 2019.

    “Everyone should be really upset and frightened by this,” Dordulian said.

    According to Dordulian, child molesters are the least likely of criminals to be rehabilitated and are four times more likely to commit the same crime again.

    “Once they’re out,” he said, “they are going to re-offend and there’s going to be another child that is victimized by these people.”

  • California’s repeal of an anti-loitering law has enabled pimps and human traffickers.

    Senate Bill 357. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in July, the measure decriminalized loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. The bill did not officially take effect until January 1 of this year; but, from the moment it became law back in July, these women say, the on-the-ground reality changed. “The minute the governor signed it, you started seeing an uptick on the streets,” Powell said. “And on social media, the pimps were saying: ‘You better get out there and work because the streets are ours.’”

    The pimps were right: police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged. The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring. “As a police officer, you need probable cause to stop and investigate,” Powell explained. “So if I have a law that says you can’t loiter in this area, with pasties and a G-string, flagging down cars, I could stop you for that because you’re loitering. But if I just say I’m stopping you because you look kind of young, that’s a little weak. So, it takes away a tool.” Without the statute, police hands were suddenly tied. Henceforth, questioning the girls—and potentially provoking a violent confrontation with pimps—came to seem a Pyrrhic gamble, one that California’s police officers would now avoid.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Gavin Newsom’s wife’s films shown in school promote both the radical transexual agenda and Democrats.

    The films, which include “Miss Representation,” “The Mask You Live In,” “The Great American Lie” and “Fair Play,” are licensed to taxpayer-funded schools across every state and sometimes contain sexually explicit imagery and push students to feel “shame and sorrow” about American society split by privilege and oppression. They are paired with curricula that include discussion on Gov. Newsom’s comments within the films, urging them to gather their friends and vote for aligned politicians that support a “care economy” that “embraces universal human values.”

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Former Beaverton, Oregon Democratic mayor Dennis ‘Denny’ Doyle sentenced to six months for possessing child pornography. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Closer to home: “Prosper ISD [Dallas County Metroplex] School Board President Arrested for Indecency with a Child.”
  • George Soros’ right-hand political man is working hand-in-glove with the Biden White House. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Suchomimus has a video breakdown of which tanks from where are going to Ukraine.
  • Not mentioned: Morocco is sending upgraded T-72s.
  • Union membership hits record lows.
  • Scott Adams admits Flu Manchu vaccine critics were right.
  • When real life imitates The Babylon Bee: Illinois Democratic Governor “Pritzker Demands Black Queer History in AP African-American Studies.”
  • “Former Arlington teachers union president charged with embezzlement. A former president of the Arlington teachers union, who was ousted last spring, has been charged with embezzling more than $400,000 from the organization. Ingrid Gant, 54, of Woodbridge, was arrested yesterday (Monday) in Prince William County on four counts of embezzlement.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “Thirty years ago, Guan County, Shandong Province launched the ‘Hundred Childless Days‘ campaign under the aegis of national family planning, known in the West as the ‘one-child policy.’ The birthplace of the “Boxers” was deemed to have too high a birth rate by the provincial government. County officials sought to correct this by ensuring that not a single baby was born between May 1 and August 10, 1991.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • EU: Eat the bugs, peasants.
  • The Five > All of CNN.
  • “Austin hair salon could shut down due to neighboring homeless camp.”

    North says they do not feel safe anymore, and she believes it all ties back to the large homeless encampment located only feet away from the salon.

    “Our safety started to become a big issue. We suffered from multiple break-ins. We’ve had our cars broken into. We clean up feces and needles on a weekly basis. It increased from that to, you know, people approaching us and threatening us with weapons, threatening rape, murder, all of those things,” said North.

    The salon has been up and running just off Ben White Blvd. for four years now. North says she has seen an uptick in crime for a while now, but the dangerous behavior from people living in this encampment picked up recently.

    “In the past year, it’s gotten increasingly worse and, in the past couple of weeks, it’s gotten to the point where I actually finally felt like this might shut my business down,” said North.

    Erin Mutschler, another co-owner of the salon, says they have called the police every time they have dealt with a situation like the one caught on video, but she says police often take 45 minutes to an hour for anyone to show up.

    The mayorship of Steve Adler is the gift that just keeps giving, even with him out of office… (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • “Former Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s entire legal team has asked a federal judge to withdraw from representing the city’s top prosecutor.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Stop! Hammertime!
  • Insurance companies are refusing to insure Hyundais and Kias because they’re too easy to steal.
  • How easy? This easy. All you need is a screwdriver and a USB cable…
  • Intel reports quarterly loss.
  • Follow-up: Democratic State Rep. Harold Dutton: “Don’t Blame Abbott, Houston ISD Takeover Plan Was My Idea.” (Previously.)
  • A Florida woman was pulled from a storm drain for the third time in two years. Maybe she was looking for David Icke’s lizard people. Also, she sounds like a real winner: “Police said her license had been suspended 17 times from 2007 to 2020.” (Previously.) (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Jay Leno broke his collarbone, several ribs and both kneecaps in a motorcycle accident. But it sounds like a freak accident: “So I turned down a side street and cut through a parking lot, and unbeknownst to me, some guy had a wire strung across the parking lot but with no flag hanging from it…I didn’t see it until it was too late. It just clothesline me and, boom, knocked me off the bike.” (There’s no evidence the line was strung there by Conan O’Brien.) “But I’m OK!…I’m working this weekend.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “Hillary Clinton Boasts Of Having No Classified Documents From Her Time As President.”
  • Why Commies Couldn’t Do Semiconductors

    Sunday, January 15th, 2023

    Asianometry has an interesting video up about East Germany expensive, strenuous efforts to catch up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing technology.

    Spoiler: They didn’t.

    Some takeaways:

  • “In the late 1980s, the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, went all in on the monumental task of domestic semiconductor production. This semiconductor obsession failed, and the billions of marks spent on it eventually bankrupted the country’s failing economy.” I think he oversells the role the semiconductor push had on bankrupting the economy; everything in late commie East Germany was failing (just like the rest of the Warsaw Pact), they suffered a credit crunch for investment due to tightened western restrictions, couldn’t export Soviet oil as profitably due to the Reagan/Saudi created oil glut, and also were running into hard currency shortages to but the components their manufacturing sector needed to keep exporting.
  • The East German Uprising of 1953 kicked off what would be a persistent, and ultimately existential problem, for the GDR: Emigration. Throughout its history, its best and smartest people consistently sought a way out to the West. To convince its people to stay, the SED [Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, AKA Socialist Unity Party of Germany] promised a better future through the use of technology. More than the Soviets, East Germany leaned on information technology as a pathway towards economic vitality and a glorious socialist future. The Party’s elites saw themselves locked in a technology race with the capitalists to see who can build a better society. Leader Walter Ulbricht called for an “industrial transformation” with the ultimate aim of “catching up with and surpassing capitalism in terms of technology.” A thriving computer industry was crucial towards making this ideology work. And in order to produce these superior computers, East Germany needed to learn and master microelectronics technology.

  • “Less than four years after the Americans invented the germanium transistor, East Germany moved quickly to build their own line of first generation semiconductors. In 1952, development work began at the VEB Works for Electrical Components for Communications Technology, or WBN, in the town of Teltow near the city of Berlin. This put them about even with West Germany. The FRG’s first semiconductor factory came about in 1952, built by Siemens.” Indeed, this is very early to get into the semiconductor game. It wasn’t until 1957 that Fairchild Semiconductor, widely considered as Company Zero for America’s semiconductor industry, was founded.
  • “WBN suffered from a lack of cooperation between its industrial and academic sides. The production teams lacked discipline, hands-on experience, and did not appreciate the scale and difficulty of the task they were facing. In one incident, the team dumped hot ashes right outside a factory window where they were producing a pilot run of semiconductors.” Ouch! A very uncleanroom…
  • “The state failed to give their young semiconductor team the resources it should have gotten. Administration – their chief accountant, in particular – seemed to care very little for semiconductors. When the team asked for money to purchase felt slippers to prevent static charge buildup in the clean room, their chief accountant denied the request.”
  • The Soviets didn’t help. “Despite being the GDR’s primary political backer, the Soviets were strangely wary. In 1958, two WBN staff members traveled to the Soviet Union to do technical exchanges. A year later, they came back complaining of limited cooperation. Much of what the Soviets had developed was created for military use. Thusly, the Soviets were concerned that transferring that to the East Germans would leak via scientists defecting to the West.”
  • They tried to get information from the U.S., but Cold War tech transfer policies were already falling into place. They had better luck in the UK. “Through the contacts of Arthur Lewis, a British Labour Party politician, the delegation saw plants owned by British Philips, Siemens-Edison, and British-Thompson-Houston. The latter is a descendant of the Vickers Company that sold oil equipment to the Soviets in the early 1900s. Just thought that was a nice connection. This visit was very successful. The East Germans learned a whole lot about industrial level semiconductor manufacturing. They even managed to purchase equipment for low-frequency transistors, a trailing edge technology.”
  • Despite that, the gap grew wider: “In 1958, WBN produced 100,000 germanium diodes, transistors, and rectifiers. Worse yet, some 98% of what they produced eventually needed to be discarded throughout their entire working lives.” Classic commie quality. “That same year in 1958, the United States alone produced 27.8 million transistors. Two years later in 1960, the US grew that production capacity five times over to 131 million.”
  • “Erich Apel, head of the Economic Commission of the Central Committee Politburo and an economic reformer – wrote in late April 1959: ‘Compared to … the American, Japanese, and West German industry, we lie in a state of backwardness that can scarcely be estimated … this backwardness will not decrease through 1961 at least, but will instead grow. Another inspection in 1960 identified more items of backwardness in semiconductor production. Workers tended to use rules of thumb rather than their instruments to measure. The various factory lines did not cooperate with one another.”
  • “Interestingly, when reporting these results to the Economic Commission of the Central Committee Politburo, that inspector softened his results. In his notes to state authorities, he said the GDR was 5 to 6 years behind. But in his analysis to the more politically charged Economic Commission, he cut it in half, 3 to 4 years.” Commies always institute thermoclines of truth to avoid being purged.
  • The brain drain to the west continued. The solution: The Berlin Wall. “For semiconductors however, the Wall pinched off what little technology the GDR had imported from the West.” The solution was to suck up even more to the Soviets, and to spy harder.
  • In 1963, the aging Walter Ulbricht launched a new initiative – called the New Economy System of Planning – to bring more market elements to the GDR economy. Now industrial groups, not bureaucrats, can actually decide how money can be spent. The reform also elevated the status of technology sectors like semiconductor manufacturing in the economy. R&D spending increased by over a third from 1959 to 1963. In 1965, nearly 40% of the electronics that the GDR produced by value were semiconductors – 82 million marks out of 223 million marks in total. Four years later in 1969, that number grew four-fold. Many of these transistors went into new consumer technical goods like radios, TVs and fridges. In 1971, semiconductor production reached 535 million marks by value. That year, East Germany began producing their first integrated circuits, some 10 years after Texas Instruments did it.

  • “Strange inequalities in policy planning meant that color televisions were widely available, but consumer items like toothbrushes and toilet paper were in short supply.” Communist planning at its finest!
  • One day in 1967, the Minister of Electrical Engineering and Electronics showed up to an East German electronics firm with a suitcase full of integrated circuits from TI. He told them to copy them exactly. The Ministry for State Security – better known as the Stasi – had been engaged in scientific and technology espionage since the 1950s – mostly related to atomic engineering and other sciences. Then in 1969, the Stasi’s Scientific and Technical Sector was reorganized and expanded with the goal of acquiring military technologies. After Honecker came into power in 1971, the Stasi’s job shifted from acquiring scientific knowledge to specific technologies – mostly via informants in the West who found and handed the goods over to East Germany. One such informant was Hans Rehder, a physicist working for the West German firms Telefunken and AEG. He handed over technical secrets for over 28 years and was never caught.

  • “Western companies knew about this copying of course. In one famous example, a GDR chip analyst looking at a stolen chip from the US firm Digital Corporation saw a message n Russian, roughly translating to: ‘When do you want to stop to swipe. Own design is better.'”
  • Stasi intellectual theft kept them from falling further behind, but couldn’t close the gap. “Because the Stasi were spymasters not technical experts, they frequently asked for the wrong item. Their methods of laundering the technology before passing it on made it harder to understand how to use it. Tightening embargoes from the West also interfered with industrial development. Stolen Western products got progressively older and more expensive to acquire. The embargoes gave other countries the chance to scam the Stasi, adding mark-ups frequently in the range of 30% to 80% to even 100%. This drained the East Germans’ already limited R&D budgets.”
  • “The wholesale copying also undercut the country’s ability to export its goods abroad. The Stasi did not want other countries to see what they had managed to acquire. And had they tried anyway, sales would have been blocked on patent infringement grounds. And finally, semiconductors were getting to the point that East German technicians struggled to replicate them. As early as 1976, an IC’s physical form no longer yielded secrets on how to produce them.”
  • “In 1981, with the GDR still about 7-10 years behind the West in microelectronics development, Erich Honecker announced a ten-point program to produce the majority of its semiconductors domestically by 1985. The 1970s were rough years for the GDR. Tighter export bans. The Oil Crises of the 1970s. Heavy borrowing from the West. Declining productivity and worsening competitiveness. It was all weighing heavily – grinding the country’s economy to a halt. Gerhard Schürer, head of the State Planning Commission, convinced Honecker that investing in semiconductors would bring the country out of its economic morass.”
  • They even struck a deal with Toshiba.

    In exchange for 25 million marks, Toshiba – a long running technology  partner with the GDR – would furnish the GDR with designs for their 256 kilobyte memory chips along with instructions on how to produce them. At the time, 256-kilobyte was leading edge stuff. The GDR was still struggling to produce 64 kilobyte memory. This would have been a game-changer. But in 1987, Toshiba got caught selling submarine propeller equipment to the Soviet Union. Huge scandal back then. Afraid of getting caught again, Toshiba offered the Stasi a 95% refund to destroy the evidence. [Spy Gerhardt] Ronneberger agreed. So in July 1988, he got the money back and dissolved the chip designs in a vat of acid in front of Toshiba’s people. But never trust a spy! Those were just copies, produced for exactly that purpose.

  • Finally in September 1988, Zeiss General Director Wolfgang Biermann triumphantly presented Erich Honecker with the first samples of that 1 megabit chip – the U61000. Honecker said that the chips were “convincing proof that the GDR is maintaining its position as a developed industrial country.” This technical “triumph” was the bitterest of them all. In semiconductors, prototypes mean nothing. Production means everything. Dresden produced just 35,000 chips throughout the entirety of 1988 and 1989 with a yield of 20%.

    To say this was “piss poor” would be an understatement. Those are ruinous, “fire everyone” numbers for actual semiconductor manufacturers.

    They planned to scale up to 100,000 1 megabit chips each year. Toshiba alone produced that many in a single day. Two months later in November 1988, the leading edge moved once more. Toshiba began shipping its 4-megabit DRAM in high volume, seeking to produce a million chips a month by March 1989.

  • Then history happened. “By then, the East German economy was in shambles,  scheduled to default on its debts by early 1990. It never even got there. In May 1989, Hungary opened its borders with Austria and East Germans swarmed through there en route to West Germany. Later in November 1989, a year after its one megabit technical triumph, the Berlin Wall fell.”
  • East Germany stole as many designs as they possibly could, but they couldn’t steal the intellectual expertise behind the numerous process tweaks, nor the furious swarm of technological innovation drive by Silicon Valley’s capitalist high risk/high reword startup culture that drove Moore’s Law for decades.

    Top-down communist command economies never had a chance to keep up.