2024-05-04
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How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab
as semiconductor features have gotten smaller, the problem has only gotten more difficult. As transistors shrank, Intel found that even the most innocuous equipment change — using a slightly longer pipe or cable, for instance — could cause process disruptions to new fabs and cause months or years of lower yields. To combat this, Intel instituted a process known as Copy EXACTLY! New fabs would be identical to existing fabs to the extent possible, right down to the color and brand of the paint on the walls.
Horseshit
Electric / Self Driving cars
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Creating a low-cost EV charging station with Arduino | Arduino Blog
“Charger” isn’t even the right word, as this is more accurately EVSE (electric vehicle supply equipment). For safety reasons, the car and the EVSE communicate with each other. The car can tell the EVSE when it is safe to provide power and the EVSE will then connect a switch between the charging plug and the electrical grid. It really isn’t any more complex than a $15 smart outlet and most of the cost of an EVSE is the heavy-gauge wiring.
celebrity gossip
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Jim Jordan Drops "Smoking Gun" Over White House 'Lab Leak' Suppression At Facebook
Jordan shares a text message from Mark Zuckerberg to Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg and Joel Kaplan - the company's highest-ranking executives at the time, in which he asks if Facebook can tell the world that "the [Biden] WH put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory?" - hours after Biden accused Facebook of "killing people." Clegg responded that the Biden White house is "highly cynical and dishonest," while Sandberg said that they were being scapegoated because the White House wasn't hitting its vaccination numbers.
Musk
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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SEC shuts down Trump Media auditor over 'massive fraud' (Archive)
The US regulator said the firm, BF Borgers, and its founder, Ben Borgers, were responsible for “one of the largest wholesale failures by gatekeepers in our financial markets”. Borgers, one of the most prolific auditors of US public companies, was charged on Friday with falsely representing to clients that the firm’s work would comply with US standards, and fabricating audit documentation. Without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings, the firm has agreed to pay a $12mn penalty and Ben Borgers to pay $2mn. Borgers has expanded rapidly to become auditor to hundreds of small- and microcap companies — including the former US president’s Trump Media & Technology Group — but the SEC said that three-quarters of its audits were faulty.
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Extremist Militias Are Coordinating in More Than 100 Facebook Groups | WIRED
After lying low for several years in the aftermath of the US Capitol riot on January 6, militia extremists have been quietly reorganizing, ramping up recruitment and rhetoric on Facebook—with apparently little concern that Meta will enforce its ban against them, according to new research by the Tech Transparency Project, shared exclusively with WIRED.
Individuals across the US with long-standing ties to militia groups are creating networks of Facebook pages, urging others to recruit “active patriots” and attend meetups, and openly associating themselves with known militia-related sub-ideologies like that of the anti-government Three Percenter movement. They’re also advertising combat training and telling their followers to be “prepared” for whatever lies ahead. These groups are trying to facilitate local organizing, state by state and county by county. Their goals are vague, but many of their posts convey a general sense of urgency about the need to prepare for “war” or to “stand up” against many supposed enemies, including drag queens, immigrants, pro-Palestine college students, communists—and the US government.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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Families of people who died after Covid vaccination abandon lawsuit against AZ
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(May 2023) Social and moral psychology of COVID-19 across 69 countries
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Republicans Step Up Attacks on Scientist at Heart of Covid Lab Leak Theory - The New York Times
During a heated three-hour hearing of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Republican lawmakers at times raised their voices at the nonprofit’s leader, Peter Daszak, and said that they believed that he would fare poorly as a defendant in criminal court. The nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, which receives federal funding to study global threats from wild animal viruses, has faced suspicion over a proposal that it made in 2018 to team up with Chinese scientists on novel coronavirus experiments that Republicans believe could have led to the pandemic, despite that project’s never receiving funding.
But in a report and in extensive questioning on Wednesday, the Republicans offered no new information suggesting that EcoHealth Alliance or Dr. Daszak were involved in the coronavirus outbreak. And they did not produce any evidence pointing directly to a coronavirus leak from a lab in China, with or without EcoHealth’s involvement, a hitch in their yearslong effort to implicate Chinese and American scientists in the beginnings of the pandemic. Democrats on the subcommittee seized on the dearth of new evidence, even as they echoed Republican concerns that Dr. Daszak had not been forthcoming about his collaborations with Chinese scientists.
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Thousands Believe Covid Vaccines Harmed Them. Is Anyone Listening? - The New York Times
The Covid vaccines, a triumph of science and public health, are estimated to have prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths. Yet even the best vaccines produce rare but serious side effects. And the Covid vaccines have been given to more than 270 million people in the United States, in nearly 677 million doses. Dr. Zimmerman’s account is among the more harrowing, but thousands of Americans believe they suffered serious side effects following Covid vaccination. As of April, just over 13,000 vaccine-injury compensation claims have been filed with the federal government — but to little avail. Only 19 percent have been reviewed. Only 47 of those were deemed eligible for compensation, and only 12 have been paid out, at an average of about $3,600. Some scientists fear that patients with real injuries are being denied help and believe that more needs to be done to clarify the possible risks.
There is no central repository of vaccine recipients, nor of medical records, and no easy to way to pool these data. Reports to the largest federal database of so-called adverse events can be made by anyone, about anything. It’s not even clear what officials should be looking for. ... vaccine supporters, including federal officials, worry that even a whisper of possible side effects feeds into misinformation spread by a vitriolic anti-vaccine movement.
The rise of the anti-vaccine movement has made it difficult for scientists, in and out of government, to candidly address potential side effects, some experts said. Much of the narrative on the purported dangers of Covid vaccines is patently false, or at least exaggerated, cooked up by savvy anti-vaccine campaigns. “The sheer nature of misinformation, the scale of misinformation, is staggering, and anything will be twisted to make it seem like it’s not just a devastating side effect but proof of a massive cover-up,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at Johns Hopkins University.
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Apple announces $110B share buyback after quarterly profit and revenue drop
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Payroll employment increases by 175,000 in April; unemployment rate at 3.9%
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Boeing lost $32B since 2019, no end in sight. Can it keep losing money?
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An Oil Price-Fixing Conspiracy Caused 27% of All Inflation in 2021
Last Sunday, I wrote a piece alleging that U.S. shale oil producers colluded with the Saudi government from 2021-2023 to drive up gas prices. That essay was based on some reporting I had done, as well as a complaint from a savvy Kansas City class action law firm, Sharp Law, with special expertise in oil. The theory was that American producers, after a bitter price war from 2014-2016, got tired of competing on price with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or the OPEC oil cartel, and at some point from 2017-2021, decided to join the cartel and cut supply to the market. This action had the affect of raising oil prices, costing oil consumers something on the order of $200 billion a year.
Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission released evidence confirming that collusion played a serious role in hiking oil prices at that time. Pioneer Natural Resources CEO Scott Sheffield, a leader in the fracking field, “exchanged hundreds of text messages with OPEC representatives and officials discussing crude oil market dynamics, pricing and output.” Sheffield was explicit about his goal, saying that “if Texas leads the way, maybe we can get OPEC to cut production. Maybe Saudi and Russia will follow. That was our plan,” he said, adding: “I was using the tactics of OPEC+ to get a bigger OPEC+ done.” He talked to shareholders, publicly threatened rivals, and ultimately achieved output cuts across the industry regardless of price. “Even if oil gets to $200/barrel,” he said, “the independent producers are going to be disciplined.”
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Frustrated by 'ghost jobs'? Onatario government to crack down on employers
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Health / Medicine
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Medscape Gets Smoked | City Journal
Our presentations were dense with facts. We showed that e-cigarettes, the most popular quit-smoking aid, are far less hazardous than smoking in terms of toxin emission—95 percent less, according to the Royal College of Physicians. We discussed improvements in asthma, COPD, vascular function, and hypertension in smokers who had switched to vaping, and reported on vaping’s demonstrated superiority as a cessation method in randomized controlled trials and a large review study. We showed that e-cigarette use has not led to smoking among youth, and further explained why the claim that nicotine impairs teen brain development is speculative at best. Throughout, we insisted on the importance of continued epidemiological follow-up to detect the latent complications, if any, associated with long-term use of reduced-risk products. Our fact-driven efforts were not enough. In opposing tobacco-harm-reduction research and communication, the playbook is clear: blame the funder, evoke outrage, suppress the content.
the Medscape fiasco reflects widespread efforts to shut down all scholarship in tobacco-harm reduction. Scientific journals, for example, often refuse to publish scholars whose work is funded by tobacco companies. The American Thoracic Society publishes a family of journals that will not accept “any research that has been funded by tobacco entities.” The BMJ and other journals of the British Medical Association, such as Tobacco Control, and the Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals, including PLOS Medicine, PLOS Global Public Health, and the European Journal of Public Health impose similar restrictions. This policy extends to the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, which hosts the largest international tobacco and nicotine conference annually and bars tobacco-industry scientists from attending its annual meeting or submitting research abstracts for publication in the meeting handbook. The Society says that it needs to maintain the forum as a “safe space.”
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How the arrival of iodized salt 100 years ago changed America (Archive)
In the early 20th century, iodine deficiency was ravaging much of the northern United States. The region was widely known as the “goiter belt,” for the goiters — heavily swollen thyroid glands — that bulged from many residents’ necks. The issue was more than cosmetic: Iodine deficiency during pregnancy and lactation often led to children with severely diminished IQ and other permanent neurological impairments. And Michigan was at the epicenter of the crisis.
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As private equity dominates wheelchair market, users wait months for repairs
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Southern U.S. has faced twice the global sea level rise rate since 2010
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Documents show oil executives promoted natural gas as green – but knew it wasn't
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Costa Rica restored its forests and switched to renewable energy
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Nature conservation works, and we're getting better at it, says new study
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A Billionaire Wanted to Save 1T Trees by 2030. It's Not Going Great
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People with gas and propane stoves breathe more unhealthy nitrogen dioxide