Of course, this is become known as “dumbing down” of the populace. This morning on Morning Joe 1, there was a long discussion about the new chip factory opening up in Phoenix 2 a & b & c, which is owned by a Taiwanese company, and one of the issues apparently in America is that we do not have people who have the necessary education to manage and or supervise These installations. Our graduates from engineering schools are apparently not prepared to enter the cutting edge technologies of modern day manufacturing. They noted that the ship produced in 1956 3, which was approximately 1“ x 1/2“ compared with the same size chip produced today would require 58 billion (that’s BILLION with a B)of the old chips to make the equivalent computing power of one of the new chips. The progress of science, engineering, and manufacturing in 60+ years is beyond staggering and equally staggering is the fact that I grew up in a country which at least claimed to have the greatest minds in the world l for creativity in these fields and now we are second or third world in this regard 4 5.
1 The source explains the ignorance in the quote.
2 a It's in Chandler, not Phoenix. The city of Tempe is between Phoenix and Chandler.
2 b TMSC is an IC
manufacturer, not an IC designer. They manufacture what other companies design.
2 c Had
Marionette or
PCIntern bothered to do minimal research, they would have learned that Intel is also expanding their facility in Chandler,
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-breaks-ground-two-new-leading-edge-chip-factories-arizona.html . Intel is an IC design company, engaged with American company AMD in the computer processor equivalent of the Space Race.
3 The first
hybrid integrated circuit was created in 1958 (Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments). A hybrid integrated circuit is discrete components and interconnections on a substrate within a single package. The first monolithic integrated circuit (a circuit, including interconnections, diffused and printed onto a silicon die) was created in 1960 (Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor). These were not anywhere near being computers.
I doubt that
Marionette or
PCIntern know or understand this, but Fairchild Camera and Instruments made analog ICs, not the digital ICs used in computers. I doubt that
Marionette or
PCIntern know this, but Texas Instruments is still around and is one of the largest IC design and manufacturing companies in the world.
4 American semiconductor companies like Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, ON Semiconductor Corporation, and Analog Devices would dispute this ridiculous claim.
5 The above said, conservatives and libertarians have been sounding alarms about the dumbing down of education in the US since at least the 1980s, with early alarms sounded in the 1950s (e.g. the book
Why Johnny Can't Read). One of the biggest concerns among homeschooling parents is academic quality in public schools (it was our primary concern when we started researching and started homeschooling in the mid 1980s). It was Libs and Progs who denied and denounced the idea that public schools were being dumbed down. It was Libs and Progs who denounced - and still do - private schools as racist and elitist. It was Libs and Progs who denounced - and still do - homeschooling as
Pretext of the Year Here.. IOW, Libs & Progs have for 4+ decades denied the problem and attacked people who take action to bypass and to try to correct the problem.
Hey DU-folk! You have defended the problem!
