The Asianometry newsletter wrote a really insightful newsletter about the US Government's Semiconductor Chip Buying Problem[1] (He also has Youtube video[2] you can watch on the same newsletter)
In the newsletter and video he talks about the US's Trusted Foundry Program and the different pitfalls and challenges that came with the program.
I think the USG could definitely do at least the design side of a M1 like series of chips that cover 80-90% of their needs but yeah idk how we could make the US industry competitive again when Intel has dropped the ball so hard.
After the 2011 Japan earthquake automakers ran into a the same problem, they ran out of a pigment called Xirallic made by Merck
>After the earthquake, automakers worldwide were forced to stop making cars of certain colors because they couldn't get the aluminum-flaked Xirallic pigment that makes the paint sparkle. Merck was making the pigment at only one plant worldwide -- its Onahama plant in the quake zone -- and kept significant stocks of the product only at the same factory. It took months to restart the plant and resume deliveries.[1]
The Verge did a really good profile of the perils of just-in-time manufacturing in respect to Apple that highlights how highly efficient JIT in reducing costs but that it ultimately leads to more fragile supply chains.[2]
>Just-in-time manufacturing is highly efficient, but it’s not resilient.This style of manufacturing cuts costs — but it also means that if the supply chain is disrupted, there will be shortages.[2]
I really like this insight
>To make a more resilient system, a lot of companies may have to rethink just-in-time manufacturing. Resilience doesn’t show up as clearly on balance sheets as cost reduction, but it’s crucial for surviving disruptive events. Lowering costs by creating economies of scale and volume looks good most of the time, but once there’s a failure, companies don’t have many options.[2]
Just how much stock would companies need to avoid the problems we have now? This isn't just a supply side problem, demand for some goods has gone through the roof. How can a business compete on resilience when all their competitors are cheaper because they carry less stock.
I'm not even sure I'd want that as a consumer. Mostly I'd rather wait than pay more (although obviously not for food).
Except waiting ripples through the economy. You may not need a particular thing, but something that depends on it for their business 18 chain links away from things you need, does. And without it, certain businesses might not be able to sell anything, and thus go bankrupt, and thus put people out of work. It's all a very complicated interconnected web
>In the Soviet Union, the first production of feed protein from hydrocarbons took place in the 1970s. In total, the country built 12 plants with a designed production performance of around 1 million tonnes per year. This was close to 70% of the world’s bioprotein production at that time. The importance of the bioprotein industry in the country was comparable with that of the nuclear industry, since it allowed the Soviet Union to be self-sufficient in feedstuffs.[1]
According to the article[1] the paprin caused health issues for the animals fed on it and health problems for the people who ate the the meat obtained from the animals.
>Paprin had a devastating impact on animal health. This product disturbed the hormonal and water balance, causing the formation of oedema all over the animals’ bodies, the Russian Business Consulting agency reported, citing research by the Bashkiria State University. Meat obtained from these animals was causing flare-ups of chronic diseases in consumers. “Meat obtained from animals fed with Paprin contained an accumulation of abnormal amino acids that were incorporated into the membranes of nerve cells, thus disrupting the process of conducting a normal nerve impulse,” said Raisa Bashirova, senior researcher at Bashkiria State University. She added that it was even dangerous for humans to work with Paprin: “The workers at the plants and local residents were developing diseases such as thrush and bronchial asthma.”
Nonfiction that reads like a thriller is my favorite genre.
The last book that truly surprised me for how good it was and had been sitting unread in my queue for a while because the descriptions didn't give it justice was Empty Mansions: Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune by Bill Dedman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_Mansions
It's basically like rise and fall of Sackler family 1.0 in dynastic wealth and all crazy things that happen to the next generations. Her dad was a mining baron who created the US' largest superfund site and bought himself a Montana Senate seat and then it gets more wild from there. Unlike the Sacklers, the daughter who does seem to have arrested development re: emotional maturity- she played with dolls and ordered customized artisanal dollhouses from Japan for 500k and up into her 80s - did have a very kind heart and gave large gifts to her staff, her relatives, friends, even the guy who came in to repair the TV in her hotel room got a $40k tip. At the end there is a giant fight over multiple versions of the will, allegations of elder abuse by both Doctors Hospital in NYC and her nurse, CPA and attorney and pursuit by the IRS for unpaid gift taxes of millions of dollars.
She lived such a long life that you basically get a tour through American history throughout the book because it starts in the Gilded Age and she lives to be 105 years old! Even at the end of the book the main character who seems easy to write off as a batty old rich lady sort of earns your respect because she doesn't let the hospital push her around too much and stands her ground to many predatory family members and other sharks circling for her estate and largess.
There are some tie ins with modern tech wealth as well- a few of the purchasers of her assets including her Stradivarius violin for $2.5 million is one of the original microsoft guys!
Def check out John Carreyrou's book about Theranos, Bad Blood if you haven't already. That's imo the GOAT of this genre.
The Smartest Guys in the Room about the rise and fall of Enron is AWESOME and truly outrageous, as is Nobody would Listen by Harry Markopolos is about the Bernie Maddof ponzi scheme.
Another long read but REALLY GOOD was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which has a sloooooow start (there are a few chapters off the bat about philosophy and the origins of various schools of political theory etc) but once the Beer Hall Putsch happens it really takes off. It was written by William Shirer, an American journalist who lived in Germany and stayed through from the end of WW1 through WWII.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder was horrific reading and just gruesomely sad but also incredibly well researched and fascinating. I liked it so much I then when on an Ann Applebaum kick of Iron Curtain, Gulag and Red Famine, all of which were very good. If you were going to pick one of hers, I'd do Gulag.
John Kraukauer's Into Thin Air and Under the Banner of Heaven are excellent, as is Crisis in the Red Zone about the origins and spread of ebola in the Sierra Leon.
edit: Oh! Also Midnight in Chernobyl was amazing, especially great if you listen to it before or after watching the HBO show. It's a fantastic read even if you don't watch the show and I think is what kicked off my interest above in life in the Soviet bloc.
Red Notice by Bill Browder details his experience as a global investor during the economic transition and rise of the oligarchs in Russia under Putin and details so much of the corruption and fraud of the current regime. It was written in 2014 after Browder's partner was tortured and murdered and brought about the Magnitsky Act. All the more relevant today with Navalny's recent revelations and very good background for what is happening in Russia now.
Re: tech co books, I'd say STAY AWAY from Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez - was awful and the author is just totally unlikeable douchebag. He's not particularly insightful and the whole book was poorly written, sparsely edited bloviating.
Dear Leader by Jang Jin-sung about his life as a Pyongyang party elite, defectation and escape from North Korea was fantastic, thrilling and actually read like a real life spy novel. Some of the portions where he gets close to the border and as he survives on the lam in the Chinese border adjacent countryside while being hunted are... heart pounding.
Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick is also about life in North Korea but focuses less on the party elite and more on the suffering of the general population. Heart-wrenching, horrific, well-researched and depraved.
And the Band Played on by Randy Shilts about the origins and spread of HIV & AIDs is another fantastically written and educational medical themed nonfiction about the development of the AIDS epidemic and the world spread and US and world research responses. Several infuriating portions especially the disinformation campaigns by the blood bank industry and lobbyists once the supply was tainted with the virus.
Ugh... I have so many more, but this should get you started. Have fun and don't forget book reports are due in 5 weeks so get cracking :P
Regarding Nazi Germany, let's say, it's complicated. While it's true that Hitler apparently envisioned a corporate society in "Mein Kampf", in actuality, the industry was much more structured capitalist than anything else, even in WWII. Thus, corporatist tendencies merely controlled the labor force and bound the intellectual class and educational system to the state, rather than actually defining the economic system. (This is also true for Austria, which was an explicitly corporate state in the 1930s before the Anschluss.)
Edit: As far as economic theories of the "Third Reich" are concerned, there was (quite naturally) a fascination with Fordism.
Fossil fuels are good for the world, The reason we used them was because we did not have any real alternative at the time.
For the vast majority of history, people were dirt poor. By utilizing fossil fuels we were able to lift billions of people out of poverty.
Think about it, you cant really run an industrialized economy on 100% reneable energy.
Wind and solar are variable energy sources the more we add to the grid the more storage you have use to balance it out.
Hydro(which has its own environmental problems) and geothermal are constrained to certain regions which have favourable geography.
Fossil fuels are literally stored energy that you can stockpile and use when you want to.
We talk about replacing plastic but plastic is one of the greatest materials we ever made(its waterproof, light, flexible, we can shape it into any form and its cheap so it is accessible) just think about all the food we buy at the supermarket most of it is stored in some form plastic to keep it fresh( not talk about things it does not make sense to store in plastic ie fruit that's just silly/wasteful)
Our modern world is built with cement just look around it is everywhere, we use asphalt to build our roads and steel to build means of transport ships, trains, cars etc
We talk about decarbonization but some countries have not even really carbonized to grow their economy to what could be considered a decent standard of living.
I can't see how we can look at 3rd world countries ie India/Africa and other 3rd world countries and tell them they can't grow their economies because we used up all the carbon "budget".
You can run an industrialized economy on renewable energy. It just wouldn't look the same as the one we have developed in the presence of fossil fuels.
If there were a colony of modern humans established on an Earth-like planet that lacked surface coal seams, didn't have limestone deposits for cement, and lacked oil fields, you wouldn't expect them to shrug and say "Well, back to the stone age, I guess."
No, instead, they'd set up smart grid networks to use power when wind and solar were available and consume less energy when it was not. They'd use DC-DC converters that were more flexible under brownouts, where early energy systems didn't have that technology and had to rely on fixed transformers and fixed frequencies. They'd connect long distance, high-voltage lines between areas with hydro and geothermal energy to regions without, using pumped hydro storage when variable energy sources had excesses. Yes, they'd run Sabatier process factories to generate synthetic hydrocarbons for plastics and portable fuels, they'd precipitate calcium carbonate from ocean salts and atmospheric CO2 to make cements and ceramics; these would probably be less plentiful as a result of their cost and because they'd be aware that they don't decay but they wouldn't be nonexistent.
Our energy systems are moving bit by painful bit in this direction already. Indian, African, and other growing economies are growing in a world where renewables are cheap, where we have tech that makes them more usable, and where there's a lot of knowledge about climate and environmental science so they don't have to make the same mistakes we did.
Yes, the industrialized world works the way it does because of a history of fossil fuels. It may even have been impossible to jump-start the industrial revolution without them. But it doesn't have to remain that way.
They could certainly have been good for the world and also bad for the world going forward. We even have cliches about this, "too much of a good thing," etc. It's not a difficult concept.
> Fossil fuels 'were' good for 'the current human civilization, as it allowed to quickly develop technology at the cost of future' because we did not have any real alternative at the time.
What type of rotor system did it have? Youtuber Peter Sripol has a video where he designed a rubber band powered helicopter with a working tail rotor to show the mechanics of how a helicopter works. In the video he shows and explains why a stability mechanism is important and at 2:56 in the video he says that you see all these people on YouTube making their own helicopters that don't know anything about helicopters building rigid rotors system and that he is glad the helicopters are underpowered because they would just end up killing the people around them.
Here is the video its worth a watch from the start
In the newsletter and video he talks about the US's Trusted Foundry Program and the different pitfalls and challenges that came with the program.
[1]https://asianometry.substack.com/p/the-government-semiconduc...
[2]The US Military's Semiconductor Buying Problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSNhk4TflKA