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Comment Good work guys! (Score 1) 39

Normal industry: Your factory has an expensive milling machine and a cheap stamping machine. Thankfully, customers actually seem to prefer stamped parts for most cases and you can produce those quickly; so you keep stamping out parts and rolling in cash.

Tech industry: As above but your entire c-suite believes that the milling machine with turn into mecha-jesus and end history; so you are bulldozing everything you can to build more milling machines.

Comment Wrong question. (Score 4, Insightful) 63

It seems likely that the answer to this question is 'yes'; but it seems like a mistake to be distracted by it when we are talking about people who are, busily and intentionally, building 'AI' products against the public.

It's mildly comical when they attempt to emulate humanity; but the important bit isn't the cluelessness; it's the malice.

Comment Re:Oh boy. (Score 1) 65

I suspect that this would be more tedious(and potentially less flattering); but you'd think that the metric you'd really care about for the juche-computer would be component availability.

Going by cost is interesting if you are trying to get the attention of balance-of-trade types and tariffs and dumping hawks; but it's an almost perfectly wrong measure if you are trying to catch any "oops, turns out that only the Chinese vendors so hungry they are considering offshoring to Vietnam still make a random passive or unexciting tolerances switching IC because it's a zero-margin part with no real room for differentiation that everyone who could got out of years ago" type situations.

If it's a real, drop-dead, 'national security' problem some of those are probably less serious, if there's a much fancier TI part that is overkill for the job but could be subbed in for only 3-4 factors of ten more; but if you want to keep economically viable civilian production open or it doesn't have a direct upmarket analog that could get really awkward; even if you've ensured that all the fancy logic ICs, copper, and gold are geopolitically friendly.

That's basically the Nexperia story, slightly simplified. Philips decided to private equity semiconductors generally; NXP decided to shove a bunch of the boring parts out to WingTech; then 'oops' European manufacturers who need diodes and ESD protection parts they thought were cheap jellybean stuff have cars piling up on the line because they can't get them.

Obviously losing a really cutting edge capability isn't preferred; but it's also the sort of thing that people notice because those tend to be pretty valuable; while low and middling capabilities, including ones that are sophisticated enough that you can't just throw money at restoring them fast, are things that are voluntarily surrendered because getting rid of low margin products makes line go up.

Comment Re:Terrible feature (Score 1) 169

Efficiency of an electrical inverter: 90%

Efficiency of a gasoline generator: 20%

A gasoline generator might work as an emergency backup, but would not be economical for daily load leveling.

TFS says the inverter's extra hardware costs $650.

A 10kw gasoline generator would cost at least as much.

Comment Re: good old days? (Score 1) 123

The good old days were before that. Circa '92 was good. Reasonable etiquette, news groups for almost every interest you could care to name, decent people you could run into (a bunch of people I met on the 'net prior to '92 was the start of many trips over to the States, many of whom I'm still in touch with). After '92-93 was the Eternal September, and the net went to hell in a handbasket.

Comment Re:ha (Score 1) 67

Quite strange how the company remained profitable with years of people working from home.

Nope. Warner Bros. was losing money before the merger and had accumulated $40B in net debt.

The headcount reduction was sorely needed, and the merger makes it even more necessary.

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