Who feigned Roger Rabbit?

Tim May tcmay at got.net
Thu Jan 30 00:04:30 PST 2003


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

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


>
>> 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.

>> (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





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