On Wednesday, January 29, 2003, at 11:14 PM, James A. Donald wrote:

-- On 29 Jan 2003 at 21:08, Tyler Durden wrote:

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Meanwhile, regulations and governments can give some industries a head start, particularly if a "jungle" already holds a nice warm niche for the output of those industries. Thus Sematec helped US semiconductors to roar back from the brink of extinction,

Sematec was a boondoggle and complete failure

I discussed Sematech in my last post. It was, as James says, completely unnecessary. As witnessed by the fact that no significant technologies or methods came out of it...and as evidenced by the fact that no technology startups are being spun out of Sematech. It existed mainly as a "jobs program" for Texas, which was suffering in the 1980s from the Oil Patch downturn (the so-called "neutron buildings" of Houston being a symptom: the people are destroyed but the skyscrapers remained standing"...the joke took on a second wind when the Enron/Dynegy/etc. problems hit recently). As befitting any jobs program, now there is a "Sematech II" being set up in depressed upstate New York. All the usual pork barrellers are saying it's just what's needed to help terminally ill Kodak! Do the math.

and the buying up (and

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subsequent dismantling) of lite rail systems in the LA basin in the 30s and 40s apparently had a major impact on the rollout of vehicles Might we have seen much better public transportation in that area if this capitalist coup-d'etat hadn't occurred?

Public transport received, and continues to receive enormous subsidies.

What can be said to "Tyler Durden," a made-up movie character name who gets his economic theory from "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" Mass transit is usually the first thing given up by those with money. It's a form of the demographic transition which is the same reason Malthus was wrong. Sometime I take a bus when my car needs to be repaired. From my house to Santa Cruz, a total of 13 miles, it takes a minimum of 80 minutes by bus. For a working person, if their time is worth very little or if they just cannot raise the $500 to buy a car and the $800 a year to insure it, then taking the bus is their only choice. But as soon as they can raise the money, they buy cars. Then that 80-minute each way trip drops to 20 minutes. And they can go when they wish, not when the bus schedule permits. And they can go other places the buses don't go (which is nearly everywhere in nearly everyplace I have lived). And so on. In some dense urban areas, or in certain grid layouts, buses make sense. In which case they don't need to be subsidized. But in nearly all places they ARE subsidized...and they are filled with drooling retards, the halt and the lame, kids, oldsters too feeble to drive, and more drooling retards. In an area as large as LA, freeways were the only way to let people (with money, which was nearly everyone) get from Point A to Point B. A series of bus transfers would have made for 2-3 hour bus trips in each direction. The Red Line was in only a stretch in the downtown, and pushing out to the recreational areas near the beaches. It was fine for its time, e.g., the 1920s, but of little use once the city expanded in all directions. The newer forms of mass transit in LA are better-suited than the Roger Rabbitt-famed Red Line was, but are still massively subsidized and mostly filled with drooling retards.

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The moon shots did apparently accelerate the development of semiconductors.

No they did not.

I have written so many pieces trying to disabuse people of this notion about going to the moon that I cringe at the thought of writing another one. The Apollo spacecraft had as its MOST ADVANCED CHIP TECHNOLOGY a technology called "DTL," standing for "diode-transistor-logic." This is the technology which came after RTL (resistor-transistor-logic) and before TTL (transistor-transistor-logic). It is the technology of circa 1961-2, when the specs were frozen and the contracts let out. It did absolutely nothing to push chip technology in the slightest way. This bullshit by statists about how the moon landing helped technology has got to stop.

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(A side note should be made here about the fact that some technologies have a very high activation energy barrier...without a very intensive amount of capital, they can't happen. Indeed, aren't we nearly at that point with sub-0.13um technology? It is possible that further advances just won't be possible without direct or indirect government funding.)

Utter bullshit. Intel is very far along on 90 nm, 300 mm technologies, none of it funded by Big Brother. You will see products based on this before summer. --Tim May