20 Comments

I think you intended "silicon", although silicone is also used as it's an insulator. I frankly had to Google the exact difference, even though I knew there was one. Also, typos are a bitch when you publish on Substack - I know from experience.

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Fortunately, this one can be played with.

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This washing machine story takes me back to the early 80's when I was writing software for the C64. A story was circulating back then that the Commodore, Atari and other machines that used the 6502 and 6800 chips were banned for export to the USSR, but that they were still getting them in via Finland. Supposedly they were pulling the chips to use in missile guidance systems. I wonder now if that was actually true, although I do know it could be done. I was using a system called FORTH which was developed for that exact application, although I was using it for more mundane tasks. FORTH ran lightning fast compared to anything else in the field back then, had a small footprint and was very robust, which is what you want for missile guidance.

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Yes, the sanctions game's been ongoing for decades. The presumption that Russia hadn't figured a work-around or other substitute displays very faulty thinking.

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Yes, COCOM back in the day.

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Here's another sanction story from about the same era, this time it was the USSR doing it. At the time you couldn't import western rock albums, so a friend of mine used to make cassette tapes of bands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and sell them in his high school in Yekaterinburg. Where did he get the records from which he made the tapes? His uncle was a diplomat who regularly travelled to West Germany and he brought them back in a diplomatic pouch...lol!

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As in “silicone implants”.

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This shows what a country can do when it maintains a world class education system, and does not choke itself with such policies as "intellectual property rights".

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[Bit late, but I had to think about it.]

Commissioning is the suggestion to an enterprise of collaborative production that it delivers what the commissioner requires and the commissioner makes provision of the wherewithal to accomplish it.

In a mutualist economic system commissioning is initiated when there is a high probability of meeting the people’s needs, now or in the near or far futures. The commissioners are those entrusted with the responsibility of meeting the people’s needs.

Whether the suggestions are feasible is decided by the commissioners in consultation with the technical experts in the particular area of competence, and those furnishing the finances advise on whether the wherewithal is forthcoming. This is how matters outlined in “Russia, making chips?” are progressed. Things are done because it is the right thing to do in the public interest. Mutual aid.

In the West, capitalist commissioning of innovative production will only be initiated if the owners of enterprises believe that there is a high probability that production will return a big enough profit for extraction and distribution to the owners or their shareholders. The populace doesn’t come into it. So commissioning can’t serve the public interest. Private profit.

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Yes, the big flaw in the Capitalist system is it puts profit over people and can't seem to fathom why that's immoral. Same with all debts must be paid.

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If those washing machine chips could be used in weapons, it would be a smart thing to do if you had a shortage of own chips due to unforeseen ramp-up of missiles production, until you fix that shortage. If that actually works, that's a good quick and cheap solution.

It's like making fun of cope cages. Yes, they look funny, but they work, so what's the problem?

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Noun

silicone (countable and uncountable, plural silicones)

(chemistry) Any of a class of inert, semi-inorganic polymeric compounds (polysiloxanes), that have a wide range of thermal stability and extreme water repellence, used in a very wide range of industrial applications, and in prosthetic replacements for body parts.

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Fun word play. What sort of chips was the West talking about, or were they wafers or biscuits? Silicone chips would be chewy wouldn't they?

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Karl, what he’s trying to say is it’s silicon, not silicone.

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I'm not an expert, just a digital tech observer, and I believe that no country on the planet including Russia needs to feel backward because they can't fabricate the most advanced digital processors. The reality is that there's only one place that can, and that's in the Chinese territory of Taiwan. Everybody else is well behind, including the USA. (Although the South Koreans and Japanese are very good at fabricating memory chips.)

Unless future processors can unlock some heretofore unknown principle or capability, it seems unlikely that any country will gain a significant strategic advantage by wielding the latest and greatest silicon. Science fiction aside, weapons don't need advanced chips. Even the most advanced weapons these days have nowhere near the computational power that you have in a smart phone. It's just not necessary. To sustain a strategic military advantage instead requires weapons that are inexpensive, plentiful, simple and robust, relatively speaking. You don't need a missile with the capability to phone home, check your email, message a friend and play the latest video games. It just needs to seek and destroy a target, which in comparison is an easy task. Moreover going to the trouble of putting the latest silicon in a weapon means that it's vastly more expensive and slow to put into service. That raises the risk of asymmetry. Having your $100 million weapon destroyed by a $50,000 missile is a losing game.

Again, Russia is well behind the most advanced chip manufacturing nations, but it's such a technological niche industry that so is almost everyone else, including the USA. And it's not clear that being behind in that field is a practical disadvantage, at least as yet.

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Silicon, not silicone...

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Yes, China is a massive workshop producing things, whether silicon chips for white goods or silicone the polymer for personal products, India, the most populous nation wants to take over the top spot and many other nations are running up behind them. As the Empire crumbles the Afro-Asian future looks ready to glisten.

However, the spanner in the works that neither you, nor Glenn Dieson nor Ben Norton address is the climate crisis caused by all this production and growth which will be handed from the old world order to the shiny new one.

Carbon emissions and temperatures are still rising though coverage of them has disappeared from MSM, the Paris agreement has failed, there is a mass species extinction going on with huge losses of pollinators, oceans and soils are having polluted and overworked and conspiracy theories about 'globalists' creating fires, floods and hurricanes with direct energy weapons and HAARPs (an obscure project in Alaska using high frequency radio waves in the ionosphere which have never been known to affect the weather) in order to control us and force us into Smart Cities are all over the net: particularly favoured by climate crisis denying (De Santis even banning the words climate change ) right wing Trumpers. The absence of discussion and these conspiracies have set the doubt in the collective mind, however, the climate crisis has not gone away.

There may be mass migration, by as early as 2070, when a billion people find it too hot for agriculture - the lucky latitudes receiving the mostly brown or black migrants look like being North America and Russia. Xenophobia is already on the increase as the old world dies- these migrants may be shot at the borders or they may change the phenotype of these countries.

The growth of silicon chips won't be anything to worry about. Getting enough potato chips to eat will be.

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The climate crisis was caused by the initial industrialization process and the use of very dirty read high CO2 content fuels. The nations wanting to atatin better living conditions for their citizens aren't involved i that sort of industrialization and have actually leap-frogged that step and are using much cleaner fuels. Equity demands the initial industrialized nations do what they can to decarbonize the environment, but as we see with massive tariffs on China's EVs, they have no sense of responsibility and have used the so-called Green Agenda for political purposes; the destruction of Nord-Stream was part of NATO's anti-Green agenda. Furthermore, buildings are the most energy inefficient products of modernity. And it's known how to properly build buildings that are actually carbon negative, but there's very little incentive to do that in developed nations where the market for sort of buildings involved--commercial real estate--is in a depression with vacancy rates of 40-60% and higher.

And then there's the #1 producer of greenhouse gases--military operations. The West's continual use of military conflict either directly or by proxy needs to cease for humanitarian reasons first and foremost, but also for environmental reasons.

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Or rather, has come.

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All this may be true, it doesn’t alter the fact that the climate crisis is coming.

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