#Electronics Manufacturing Jobs

[memjobs]

To empower individuals and Electronics industry companies by providing career and recruitment solutions and services as per career choice and market needs.

We will continuously provide superior value to our users and customers by delivering best-in-class solutions and services through leveraging our expertise in Industry, Technology, Sales and Service.

Learn more: https://www.memjobs.com/

[comradejoanmir]

If reddit says "japanese business practices" One more time I'm gonna break smth can't believe you guys have me defending corporations tonight

[aptechvisaglobalimmigration]

Ontario PNP conducted 2 OINP draws for applicants under the Employer Job Offer Foreign Worker stream on April 23rd, 2024 On the 23rd of April 2024, Ontario PNP conducted a draw under the Employer Job Offer Foreign Worker stream, inviting several NOCs. This Ontario PNP latest draw invited applicants with a score of 53 and a job offer letter.

Illustrated below is the result of the latest Ontario PNP draw 2024 result for Ontario’s Employer Job Offer Foreign Worker Stream:Date of drawNumber of NOI’s issuedScoreApril 23, 2024n/a53

Your Employer Job Offer Foreign Worker stream: skilled trades occupations must mention one of the following NOCs as your primary NOC based on your work experience:

NOC 22212 – Drafting technologists and technicians

NOC 22301 – Mechanical engineering technologists and technicians

NOC 22302 – Industrial engineering and manufacturing technologists and technicians

NOC 22311 – Electronic service technicians (household and business equipment)

NOC 22312 – Industrial instrument technicians and mechanics

NOC 70010 – Construction managers

NOC 70011 – Home building and renovation managers

NOC 70012 – Facility operation and maintenance managers

NOC 72010 – Contractors and supervisors, machining, metal forming, shaping and erecting trades and related occupations

NOC 72011 – Contractors and supervisors, electrical trades and telecommunications occupations

NOC 72012 – Contractors and supervisors, pipefitting trades

NOC 72013 – Contractors and supervisors, carpentry trades

NOC 72014 – Contractors and supervisors, other construction trades, installers, repairers and servicers

NOC 72020 – Contractors and supervisors, mechanic trades

NOC 72021 – Contractors and supervisors, heavy equipment operator crews

NOC 72022 – Supervisors, printing and related occupations

NOC 72024 – Supervisors, motor transport and other ground transit operators

NOC 72100 – Machinists and machining and tooling inspectors

NOC 72101 – Tool and die makers

NOC 72102 – Sheet metal workers

NOC 72103 – Boilermakers

NOC 72104 – Structural metal and plate work fabricators and fitters

NOC 72105 – Ironworkers

NOC 72106 – Welders and related machine operators

NOC 72200 – Electricians (except industrial and power system)

NOC 72201 – Industrial electricians

NOC 72203 – Electrical power line and cable workers

NOC 72204 – Telecommunications line and cable installers and repairers

NOC 72205 – Telecommunications equipment installation and cable television service technicians

NOC 72300 – Plumbers

NOC 72301 – Steamfitters, pipefitters and sprinkler system installers

NOC 72302 – Gas fitters

NOC 72310 – Carpenters

NOC 72311 – Cabinetmakers

NOC 72320 – Bricklayers

NOC 72321 – Insulators

NOC 72400 – Construction millwrights and industrial mechanics

NOC 72401 – Heavy-duty equipment mechanics

NOC 72402 – Heating, refrigeration and air conditioning mechanics

NOC 72403 – Railway carmen/women

NOC 72404 – Aircraft mechanics and aircraft inspectors

NOC 72406 – Elevator constructors and mechanics

NOC 72410 – Automotive service technicians, truck and bus mechanics and mechanical repairers

NOC 72422 – Electrical Mechanics

NOC 72423 – Motorcycle, all-terrain vehicle and other related mechanics

NOC 72500 – Crane operators

NOC 73100 – Concrete finishers

NOC 73101 – Tilesetters

NOC 73102 – Plasterers, drywall installers finishers and lathers

NOC 73110 – Roofers and shinglers

NOC 73111 – Glaziers

NOC 73112 – Painters and decorators (except interior decorators)

NOC 73113 – Floor covering installers

NOC 73200 – Residential and commercial installers and servicers

NOC 73201 – General building maintenance workers and building superintendents

NOC 73202 – Pest controllers and fumigators

NOC 73209 – Other repairers and servicers

NOC 73400 – Heavy equipment operators

NOC 73402 – Drillers and blasters – surface mining, quarrying and construction

NOC 82031 – Contractors and supervisors, landscaping, grounds maintenance and horticulture services

NOC 92100 – Power engineers and power systems operators

Ontario PNP conducted another draw for the Employer Job Offer Foreign Worker stream:

Economic Mobility Pathways Project (EMPP) candidates invited two targeted immigrants to apply on April 23, 2024, to people who would be eligible for the Employer Job Offer: Foreign Worker stream.

We are there for you:

If you want to learn more about the latest draw for the Ontario Provincial Nomination Program, our Canadian immigration consultants can help you out. You can reach them at 750 383 2132 or 928 928 9006. Additionally, you can visit our website at www.aptechvisa.com/ontario-pnp  for further details and updates.

[seat-safety-switch]

Have you ever noticed how weird it is that microwaves all cook in roughly the same time? Sure, if you squint, you'll notice that some microwaves will say on their fronts 700 watts, others 1500 watts, but this increased power doesn't make a material difference in your life. You'll still be waiting about two minutes for your corndog to become screechingly hot, an eternity when you're hungry. There's only one notable exception: the giant, intimidating, stainless-steel microwave at your corner convenience store.

You might think that this is easy to fix. Go to the bankruptcy auction for a convenience store, buy one. Have you ever seen a convenience store go bankrupt? They are basically money printers, and any region in which they go under will already have had the microwave picked clean by gangs of near-feral copper thieves. The manufacturers won't talk to you, either: why would they bother with your dumb domestic ass, and your crybaby questions about "what kind of cord does this take," when they could use the same phone call to sell fifty more microwaves to 7-Eleven?

No, it's just like my grandfather used to say: if you want a job done right, you have to half-ass it yourself and then claim victory anyway. I would have to understand how to make a microwave. With the help of my local librarian, I was able to check out some useful books, such as Electronics For The Precocious Nine-Year-Old and its sequel, Advanced Electronics For The Nine-Year-Old Orphan. It takes a village to raise a child, or more accurately, to produce a twenty-five thousand watt, V8-powered microwave that can cook a frozen potato to "atomized" in just over seventeen seconds.

We're going to market some time next year, but in the meantime, you can buy my plans and build one yourself. All you need is an undefended electrical substation near you, some wire cutters, and absolutely no self-preservation instinct. Hey, it's an investment. Think of how much extra time you've been wasting waiting for a breakfast burrito to cook. You could use that time trying to get bail instead.

[quixoticanarchy]

Finished reading Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara and he does a good job showing how the cobalt supply chain is inextricable from incredible human suffering, near-slavery, rampant exploitation, environmental devastation, and child labor. And it’s very clear that no promise a tech or battery manufacturer makes that their supply chain is clean means literally anything bc industrially and artisanally mined cobalt are mixed into the same supply untraceably. And the book also covers the fact that cobalt supplies are finite and when the DRC’s cobalt is exhausted the industry will move elsewhere, rinse and repeat, and the people in the Congo will be left with the ongoing and unremediated -maybe irremediable - damage. All of this so that we can have smartphones, electric vehicles, iPads, electric scooters, almost anything with a rechargeable battery.

It’s also clear that the tech and battery industries are interested in good PR and making empty statements about human rights when they should be taking responsibility for the working conditions of small-scale miners (and minors) dying at the bottom of their supply chains. What Kara doesn’t really address is the demand side of this equation, not just the demand by companies whose products use cobalt-containing batteries but also the consumers sustaining that demand, who buy every new smartphone and eagerly pin their hopes on electric vehicles to let us keep our car-dependent world without the fossil fuel guilt. The book takes it for granted that cobalt will be required in high quantities for consumer electronics and for “green” tech, and to some extent this is true - as in, none of those demands or uses will cease overnight and in the meantime we should worry about how to address industrial and business practices and government corruption in order to treat Congolese miners as human beings.

But it feels incomplete without also asking questions like: should that demand continue? Can it? Do we need this many devices? What costs are acceptable? Can we really have our cake (smartphones, EVs, etc) and eat it too (slavery-free, non-exploitative supply chains that don’t kill the people at the bottom and lay waste to the environment)? What if - as the book would seem to suggest - we really cannot? If one goal of the book is for people to realize what conditions underlie the extraction of cobalt, what action is then incumbent upon us? Personal consumer choice will not undo all this harm, but it is a necessary step in rethinking or attempting other ways to live. Is it a right to have a smartphone, a new one every year or two, if it comes at the price of other people’s human rights? At what point do we say that it is not an acceptable cost that the extractive industries are perpetuating neocolonialism and near-slavery in order that we should have comfortable lives?

We know we have to stop relying on fossil fuels or we’ll burn down the planet (to a greater degree than is already locked in) but the “green energy transition” is not clean at all. Capitalism seeks the lowest price for labor and the highest profits; obviously these extractive relationships owe a lot of their horror to being conducted in a capitalist milieu. But even thinking about, say, a socialist world instead, if it aspires to still provide smartphones and electric vehicles en masse and maintain the comforts and conveniences of the “Western” lifestyle then we would still be relying on massive amounts of resource extraction with no guarantee of less suffering. The devices are themselves part of the problem. The demand for them and the extent to which “modern” life in “developed” countries relies upon them is part of the problem. It is unsustainable. It is built on blood and it makes a mockery of purported values of dignity, equality, and human rights. The lives of Congolese cobalt miners are tied to how we in the “developed” or colonizer countries live and consume. I do not think their lives will change substantially unless ours do.

[weirdmarioenemies]

Name: Sheep Man

Debut: Mega Man 10

Most of the Robot Masters are too "Man" for my tastes. But this one? This one is Sheep! And that makes him so awesome. Sheep Man was created to be a sheep herding robot, which is rather silly, since humans have already created a guy to help with sheep herding. That guy's name is "Dog", and he loves to do it! Sheep Man, however, left this job to work as a circuit board tester, which makes more sense. I don't think any dog breeds have been developed to do that yet.

Sheep Man's job at the circuit board manufacturer was in their static resistance test division, since he noticed static buildup in his wool. And this got me thinking, is there really truth to the Electric Sheep concept? I mean in the sense of static wool, of course. I am well aware that, unfortunately, regular sheep cannot use Zap Attacks. Wool is indeed likely to give up electrons and take on a positive charge, but it is also great at retaining moisture, and thus can in fact prevent static cling from occurring! I guess Sheep Man must be inhabiting some very dry environments!

Considering his stage is a sort of Cyber's World, I guess it is a very dry environment? I don't know. I've never been in a digital world. Let me know if you have, and know how moist they are!

Unfortunately, as a Robot Master, you probably know that Sheep Man is sort of a Bad Guy. But it's just because he is sick, infected with Roboenza, and can be cured! I am happy that this funny sheepborg is typically a nice fellow. In battle, he demonstrates the awesome power of Sheep, by turning into four clouds of wool that float independently and zap the ground! (Shouldn't the metal ground be zapping him, if anything?) He's like a four-pack of wool dryer balls for reducing static in your clothing. When the first three do their zappies, they disappear, and the fourth turns back into Sheep Man. I'm over here trying to apply real-world physics to Sheep Man, and there he goes, generating infinite matter!

At least there is a bit of Physics Phun in that his weakness is the Rebound Striker, a rubber ball weapon. It hurts him extra because it's stealing his electrons! Give those back!

Generally, Robot Masters are "pretty neat at most" to me. You know me! I love creatures, and when robots are funny little guys that don't look like humans! So it is no surprise that I am VERY happy with the final Sheep Man design we got. The sleepy eyes are cute, yes, but I am so glad he was decided to be so much more Sheep than Man. It even looks like the design process was basically to give him more wool until he had no visible torso! Congratulations on your cephalothorax! A very excellent Man!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[W]e live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. . . . So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later.

—Philip K Dick, “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (1978)

[alex51324]

Another good one from Vox about the upcoming Trump Tariffs, and what they might mean for your near-future spending.

The first thing to understand is that tariffs absolutely do not do what Trump thinks they do. Trump has pitched tariffs as a way to lower prices, which is simply...wrong. He also seems to be under the impression that tariffs are a way to make foreign companies pay taxes to the United States. That is also wrong.

A tariff is a tax on imported goods. The usual reason for imposing a tariff is to protect domestic production from being undercut by cheaper imported goods--if Domestic Company A can produce widgets for $10 a dozen, but Foreign Company B can do it for $8 a dozen, you impose a 20% widget tariff, and Company A and Company B's widgets both end up on the domestic market at the same price. That way, Company A has no particular reason to move their widget factory to another country where it might be cheaper to operate, thus keeping jobs, wages, and prices at the current level.

Economists debate whether tariffs are actually a good way to achieve these goals; however, even if we assume it does, you can probably see a few problems. First, and most obviously, lowering prices is nowhere in the definition of what people who really like tariffs say that they do. On the contrary, they are intended to prevent prices from dropping due to cheaper imports, and they do that because the tariff is paid not by the foreign manufacturer, but by the domestic distributor, who typically passes that cost directly to the consumer.

Second, if we were going to use tariffs to support American manufacturing, it would have been a good idea to do that back when there was some American manufacturing left to protect. Like around the time Trump was in kindergarten, would have been a great time to start. Even 1980 might not have been too late.

If--and this is a big if--heavy tariffs on imported goods are maintained for a long time, it could happen that tariffs eventually slowly start to bring manufacturing, and manufacturing jobs, back to the US. It could happen.

But if it did, it would take a lot longer than four years. And what happens in the meantime, is that prices on everything we import will skyrocket. And what we import includes most of our clothing, electronics, household items, large appliances, small appliances, cars, children's toys--just about anything you can name. And a fair bit of our food. (We also export a lot of food, so unless climate change wallops us real hard in the next few years, we don't have to worry a whole lot about actual food shortages, but it will not be surprising if we see higher prices and less selection as a result of tariffs, let alone other policies that Trump has discussed.) While Trump has been (of course) light on policy specifics, some numbers he's floated are 10-20% tariffs on imported goods in general, rising to 60% on Chinese goods, and 100% on imports from Mexico.

Some sources are suggesting that, since tariffs are such a completely boneheaded idea that will not do any of the things Trump claims to believe* they will do, surely someone will manage to explain this in a way that he can understand, before he actually imposes them. The author of the Vox article above thinks that's unlikely, and that having made such a big deal about tariffs on the campaign trail, Trump will charge ahead with them anyway. I don't know.

However, the point is, if you're thinking about a major purchase, you might want to do that before January 20. Especially if it's something where the manufacturing is concentrated in China, like laptops, phones, that kind of thing. According to the article, the Consumer Technology Association is saying prices in that category could go up as much as 40%, if Trump follows through on what he's floated.

And he might not! We simply do not know. However, my laptop has started doing that thing where you have to wiggle the charging cable to get it to connect; in the before-times, I'd figure I have a few months before I really have to worry about it, but as things are, I'm keeping an eye on the Black Friday sales.

(*There's some speculation that what Trump actually wants to do is weaken China's economy, which happens to be something that Putin would like to see. Another possibility is that he has some idea about reducing America's reliance on/relationships with other countries, as a way of furthering some goal of his. Or maybe he just wants to start selling Trump-branded phones, IDK.)

[treethymes]

With the exceptions of North Korea and Cuba, the communist world has merged onto the capitalist highway in a couple different ways during the twenty-first century. As you’ve read, free-trade imperialism and its cheap agricultural imports pushed farmers into the cities and into factory work, lowering the global price of manufacturing labor and glutting the world market with stuff. Forward-thinking states such as China and Vietnam invested in high-value-added production capacity and managed labor organizing, luring links from the global electronics supply chain and jump-starting capital investment. Combined with capital’s hesitancy to invest in North Atlantic production facilities, as well as a disinclination toward state-led investment in the region, Asian top-down planning erased much of the West’s technological edge. If two workers can do a single job, and one worker costs less, both in wages and state support, why pick the expensive one? Foxconn’s 2017 plan to build a U.S. taxpayer–subsidized $10 billion flat-panel display factory in Wisconsin was trumpeted by the president, but it was a fiasco that produced zero screens. The future cost of labor looks to be capped somewhere below the wage levels many people have enjoyed, and not just in the West.

The left-wing economist Joan Robinson used to tell a joke about poverty and investment, something to the effect of: The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalists is not being exploited by capitalists. It’s a cruel truism about the unipolar world, but shouldn’t second place count for something? When the Soviet project came to an end, in the early 1990s, the country had completed world history’s biggest, fastest modernization project, and that didn’t just disappear. Recall that Cisco was hyped to announce its buyout of the Evil Empire’s supercomputer team. Why wasn’t capitalist Russia able to, well, capitalize? You’re already familiar with one of the reasons: The United States absorbed a lot of human capital originally financed by the Soviet people. American immigration policy was based on draining technical talent in particular from the Second World. Sergey Brin is the best-known person in the Moscow-to-Palo-Alto pipeline, but he’s not the only one.

Look at the economic composition of China and Russia in the wake of Soviet dissolution: Both were headed toward capitalist social relations, but they took two different routes. The Russian transition happened rapidly. The state sold off public assets right away, and the natural monopolies such as telecommunications and energy were divided among a small number of skilled and connected businessmen, a category of guys lacking in a country that frowned on such characters but that grew in Gorbachev’s liberalizing perestroika era. Within five years, the country sold off an incredible 35 percent of its national wealth. Russia’s richest ended the century with a full counterrevolutionary reversal of their fortunes, propelling their income share above what it was before the Bolsheviks took over. To accomplish this, the country’s new capitalists fleeced the most vulnerable half of their society. “Over the 1989–2016 period, the top 1 percent captured more than two-thirds of the total growth in Russia,” found an international group of scholars, “while the bottom 50 percent actually saw a decline in its income.” Increases in energy prices encouraged the growth of an extractionist petro-centered economy. Blood-covered, teary, and writhing, infant Russian capital crowded into the gas and oil sectors. The small circle of oligarchs privatized unemployed KGB-trained killers to run “security,” and gangsters dominated politics at the local and national levels. They installed a not particularly well-known functionary—a former head of the new intelligence service FSB who also worked on the privatization of government assets—as president in a surprise move on the first day of the year 2000. He became the gangster in chief.

Vladimir Putin’s first term coincided with the energy boom, and billionaires gobbled up a ludicrous share of growth. If any individual oligarch got too big for his britches, Putin was not beyond imposing serious consequences. He reinserted the state into the natural monopolies, this time in collaboration with loyal capitalists, and his stranglehold on power remains tight for now, despite the outstandingly uneven distribution of growth. Between 1980 and 2015, the Russian top 1 percent grew its income an impressive 6.2 percent per year, but the top .001 percent has maintained a growth rate of 17 percent over the same period. To invest these profits, the Russian billionaires parked their money in real estate, bidding up housing prices, and stashed a large amount of their wealth offshore. Reinvestment in Russian production was not a priority—why go through the hassle when there were easier ways to keep getting richer?

While Russia grew billionaires instead of output, China saw a path to have both. As in the case of Terry Gou, the Chinese Communist Party tempered its transition by incorporating steadily increasing amounts of foreign direct investment through Hong Kong and Taiwan, picking partners and expanding outward from the special economic zones. State support for education and infrastructure combined with low wages to make the mainland too attractive to resist. (Russia’s population is stagnant, while China’s has grown quickly.) China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, in 2001, gave investors more confidence. Meanwhile, strong capital controls kept the country out of the offshore trap, and state development priorities took precedence over extraction and get-rich-quick schemes. Chinese private wealth was rechanneled into domestic financial assets—equity and bonds or other loan instruments—at a much higher rate than it was in Russia. The result has been a sustained high level of annual output growth compared to the rest of the world, the type that involves putting up an iPhone City in a matter of months. As it has everywhere else, that growth has been skewed: only an average of 4.5 percent for the bottom half of earners in the 1978–2015 period compared to more than 10 percent for the top .001 percent. But this ratio of just over 2–1 is incomparable to Russia’s 17–.5 ration during the same period.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, certain trends have been more or less unavoidable. The rich have gotten richer relative to the poor and working class—in Russia, in China, in the United States, and pretty much anywhere else you want to look. Capital has piled into property markets, driving up the cost of housing everywhere people want to live, especially in higher-wage cities and especially in the world’s financial centers. Capitalist and communist countries alike have disgorged public assets into private pockets. But by maintaining a level of control over the process and slowing its tendencies, the People’s Republic of China has built a massive and expanding postindustrial manufacturing base.

It’s important to understand both of these patterns as part of the same global system rather than as two opposed regimes. One might imagine, based on what I’ve written so far, that the Chinese model is useful, albeit perhaps threatening, in the long term for American tech companies while the Russian model is irrelevant. Some commentators have phrased this as the dilemma of middle-wage countries on the global market: Wages in China are going to be higher than wages in Russia because wages in Russia used to be higher than wages in China. But Russia’s counterrevolutionary hyper-bifurcation has been useful for Silicon Valley as well; they are two sides of the same coin. Think about it this way: If you’re a Russian billionaire in the first decades of the twenty-first century looking to invest a bunch of money you pulled out of the ground, where’s the best place you could put it? The answer is Palo Alto.

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto

[fuzzkaizer]

Conn - Multi-Vider

"All the way back in 1967, C.G. Conn wanted in on the decidedly nascent effects scene, and they wanted to do so with a bang. The company partnered with Jordan Electronics of Alhambra, CA to release an octave effect for wind instruments. The resulting circuit is a truly interesting piece of gear history. It needs to be said that Conn went into manufacturing, thereby ending its partnership with Jordan (at least according to all the paperwork) and the result was two different MultiViders. The differences on the surface are minute: the first model is grey and looks like a piece of dictation equipment, offering “bright” and “dark” input modes, a top-mounted Sensitivity control, and a plethora of battery gadgets. By contrast, the much cooler-looking model “914” did away with the frequency selector, opting for a switch called Unison and a power supply input.

Both models contain “Soprano,” “Bass” and “Sub Bass” switches, and corresponding volume for each. The 914’s Unison mode is essentially a dry signal control. The “grey box” model is a little more convoluted about it but the job is effectively identical. However, the way these two models go about these identical tasks in different—yet similar—ways.

This original “grey box” model contains a duo of ersatz flip-flop circuits, which the unit relies on for its octave down effects. The circuit utilizes some rather intense gain staging to convert the signal to a crude square wave and then use the flip-flops to divide the frequency in half and then in half again. In the later 914 model, much of this circuit is switched to a CD4013 chip, an all-in-one CMOS device. It’s interesting that the first draft of the MultiVider contains what amounts to a discrete imagining of the CD4013, and what it all adds up to is the first-ever octave effect for an electronic instrument. There’s also a wah inductor on the 914, which is connected to the sub-octave circuit somehow; I dare not remove the board due to extreme rocker switch fragility. I love stuff like this.

For as cool as this whole thing sounds, there are some drawbacks, as one might expect with the first pedal of any type. As previously stated, the MultiVider is a horns-only instrument, as is to be used with Conn’s proprietary woodwind pickup. While the “grey box” model serves up a battery option, the 914 is adapter-only, and it’s a doozy—only a 12-volt eighth-inch style phone plug will do. Thankfully there are workarounds for both; if you can solder, the power situation is a cinch and the microphone issue can be circumnavigated by hitting the MultiVider with a hotter input signal. Even then, a large belt clip on the back of the unit dictates its preferred method of implementation. With all that said, synth players are at an automatic advantage with modernizing the MultiVider.

Of course, the MultiVider was an advanced device for its time, and so it was used by artists that had explored brass instruments to their fullest. In particular, the MultiVider was used by Zappa’s band, the Mothers of Invention. It was also used by Miles Davis on 1970’s The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions. Of course there are others, but with a resume like that, stick to your strengths."

cred: catalinbread.com/blogs/kulas-cabinet/conn-multivider

[stevebattle]

Robot Raiders, Video Expo Arcade, 1982 World’s Fair, Knoxville, TN. "Eight waist-high robots dashing around a ring zapping each other with light beams to the beat of rock music at the 1982 World's Fair have added a new dimension to electronic games. But the game, which costs $1.50 to play for about two minutes, may be just the "horse and buggy" of robot wars of tomorrow, its developers say. The game, called Robot Raiders, is played much like a video arcade game, except the action involves real robots, operated by remote control, in an octagonal ring. The eight humans at the controls fight their mini-war to the beat of hard rock music. As the lights flash and the music pounds, the robots race around firing light beams from their outstretched arms. The object is to hit an opponent in a a panel that registers the shot and transmits it by radio frequency to a scoreboard. "The guy says 'Go.' and everybody kind of comes up with lasers blazing," said Joe Stewardson, a photographer who says he played the game several times at the fair in Knoxville, Tenn. The robots, which are about about 3 feet tall, are "kind of your traditional robot," he said. The control stick moves left, right, forward and backward "just like a fighter pilot's," he said. While the game is getting its first public exposure at the fair, the gnome-sized warriors have been in the works for years at Sound Spectrum, an Orange County manufacturer. "What we wanted to do is extend the game beyond the cathode ray tube and develop a game that not only appealed to young people. but also adults as well…” said Gary Taylor, the head of Sound Spectrum. Dan Laughlin, another owner of the exhibit, said the players can visually track their hits by watching the light, which shows up something like a flashlight on the robot. "There are lights flashing on the floor, above and around the robots," Laughlin said. The show includes black lights and music with different frequency sounds that come from each of the robots as they shoot. Laughlin said the players, using remote-control "joy sticks," move the robots in an 18-foot radius from control podiums on the corners of the octagon. "They are inside what is almost like a cockpit of a fighter plane," he said. "They have a console where the hits are recorded, with a button on top their joy stick to shoot. While the game is popular, the owners concede it is expensive. But,” says Kail, "If a kid wants to play, he's going to pay the money. A lot of them are off on summer vacation, and have summer jobs." It's more of a main attraction, not for the average video parlor, more for theme parks and major shopping centers," he said." – Robot Raiders involves real, remote control robots, by Dolores Wood, Santa Ana, CA.

"They paid a quarter million for the world's first robot arcade game. There were eight robots but they did not work. We spent the last two months of the Fair engineering and building new robots. We had a few completed by the time the Fair closed." – Doug Dotson.

[garvet]

For as long as G53U could remember, the world had been full of magic. Probably ever since he'd reached for a sleek, shiny air analyzer—bright as cartoon candy—and licked it, saying, “Sweet.” Of course, the analyzer itself wasn’t sweet. The sweetness was the sensation of ions on the surface of his sensors. He learned to distinguish them by their names and properties a little later. Metals, synthetics, gases—everything spoke to him. The world sang, and he could guess the words, putting them together into spells. At first, only in his mind.

After the first Augmentation phase, when he moved into the training group for future systems analysts, he was given access to manuals and reference books from the company feed. Pretty soon, he learned all of them. The only books relatively available to his group were those on engineering and systems maintenance. Part of that contained magic, too.

When G53U first met a construct—brought to the class for analysis—and was able to touch it, it felt like falling into a vat of syrup. The incredible synthetics it was composed of made G53U dizzy. If he’d had the right words to describe it, he could have laid out all the top-secret information about the manufacturing company on the training console. All the connections between artificial tissues and mechanical parts obeying the electronic code. It was mesmerizing.

But for the super-secret chemistry and code, he lacked the words. Even so, he promised himself then and there that he would become the greatest wizard in the world.

After the second and third stages of augmentation, everything became clearer and simpler. The knowledge he lacked, he learned to steal. What he couldn’t steal—samples, tools—he bought. By that time, he had a maintenance job and a small income. He reduced the filtration and air quality levels in his living module to the bare minimum, ate once every two days, and supplemented his lack of nutrition with free syrup from the company coffee machine. Synthetic coffee was given to employees in almost unlimited quantities (four cups per shift), so he lived on it. And it was worth it. One day, he managed to buy a tiny container of strange synthetics. It was love at first touch—a connection to other worlds, endless possibilities.

He dove headfirst into them, surviving on little sleep. Systems analysis and work by day, reading scientific journals and writing his own papers by night.

He made contacts with other scientists. This left him with even less money for food. Sending data bundles through the wormhole, receiving bundles from the far ends of the galaxy—it all cost. He wouldn’t have lasted long if his new friends hadn’t picked up some of his regular expenses. They paid for his one-year subscription to send and receive data bundles and sent him invaluable equipment he could barely fit into his module. The miracle was becoming real. They even offered to buy him out from the company.

He spent several days dreaming that he’d be free to listen to magic in a spacious, real laboratory, without fear, discussing his discoveries with colleagues, changing things, creating, exploring. But it didn’t work out.

“Nothing,” his contact, Ratthi, said—a recent PhD who lit up the world with constant optimism. “Wait a few days, we’ve got a backup plan.”

In a few days, G53U was set to undergo the last augmentation stage. That would raise his value to sky-high levels, shutting off any chance of escape. He’d be the company’s systems analyst forever.

“Sure,” he told Ratthi. “Let’s try the backup plan. No rush.”

After the surgery, he didn’t realize what was happening at first. The world was silent, its voice replaced by the hum of the feed. G53U froze, then calmed down, figuring it was a post-op effect. But the silence didn’t go away after a day or two. The words of the world no longer formed into magical incantations. He clutched the tiny container of strange synthetics in his hand—and felt nothing.

The world was empty.

If there was still magic in it, G53U could no longer hear it.

They advised him to consume more sweets to help his brain adapt to the new conditions. He dutifully drank syrup with a bit of coffee added. It didn’t help.

When his friends managed to buy his contract for a week, sending him to Preservation as part of the backup plan, he still hoped the magic would return. Sometimes, when he drank his oversyruped synthetic coffee, he thought he could still hear the song of the world—right on the tip of his tongue.

[frank-olivier]

The Birth of an Industry: Fairchild’s Pivotal Role in Shaping Silicon Valley

In the late 1950s, the Santa Clara Valley of California witnessed a transformative convergence of visionary minds, daring entrepreneurship, and groundbreaking technological advancements. At the heart of this revolution was Fairchild Semiconductor, a pioneering company whose innovative spirit, entrepreneurial ethos, and technological breakthroughs not only defined the burgeoning semiconductor industry but also indelibly shaped the region’s evolution into the world-renowned Silicon Valley.

A seminal 1967 promotional film, featuring Dr. Harry Sello and Dr. Jim Angell, offers a fascinating glimpse into Fairchild’s revolutionary work on integrated circuits (ICs), a technology that would soon become the backbone of the burgeoning tech industry. By demystifying IC design, development, and applications, Fairchild exemplified its commitment to innovation and knowledge sharing, setting a precedent for the collaborative and open approach that would characterize Silicon Valley’s tech community. Specifically, Fairchild’s introduction of the planar process and the first monolithic IC in 1959 marked a significant technological leap, with the former enhancing semiconductor manufacturing efficiency by up to 90% and the latter paving the way for the miniaturization of electronic devices.

Beyond its technological feats, Fairchild’s entrepreneurial ethos, nurtured by visionary founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, served as a blueprint for subsequent tech ventures. The company’s talent attraction and nurturing strategies, including competitive compensation packages and intrapreneurship encouragement, helped establish the region as a magnet for innovators and risk-takers. This, in turn, laid the foundation for the dense network of startups, investors, and expertise that defines Silicon Valley’s ecosystem today. Notably, Fairchild’s presence spurred the development of supporting infrastructure, including the expansion of Stanford University’s research facilities and the establishment of specialized supply chains, further solidifying the region’s position as a global tech hub. By 1965, the area witnessed a surge in tech-related employment, with jobs increasing by over 300% compared to the previous decade, a direct testament to Fairchild’s catalyzing effect.

The trajectory of Fairchild Semiconductor, including its challenges and eventual transformation, intriguingly parallels the broader narrative of Silicon Valley’s growth. The company’s decline under later ownership and its subsequent re-emergence underscore the region’s inherent capacity for reinvention and adaptation. This resilience, initially embodied by Fairchild’s pioneering spirit, has become a hallmark of Silicon Valley, enabling the region to navigate the rapid evolution of the tech industry with unparalleled agility.

What future innovations will emerge from the valley, leveraging the foundations laid by pioneers like Fairchild, to shape the global technological horizon in the decades to come?

Dr. Harry Sello and Dr. Jim Angell: The Design and Development Process of the Integrated Circuit (Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, October 1967)

Robert Noyce: The Development of the Integrated Circuit and Its Impact on Technology and Society (The Computer Museum, Boston, May 1984)

Tuesday, December 3, 2024

[abonbons]

Magic Mushroom

Day 29 Theme Cryptic

Thank you for following along on my Funguary adventure! I had so much fun and learned a ton! Thank you @feefal for hosting such a great event!

I leave you with the full Terence McKenna quote 🍄

“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

― Terence McKenna

[onenakedfarmer]

PHILIP K. DICK "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later"

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it.

And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope.

However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life.

Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

-

Note: This is an excerpt from the speech "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" delivered at Disneyland in 1978. The complete text can be found here.

[collapsedsquid]

When electronics manufacturing took off in China in the 1980s, rural women who had just begun moving to the cities made up the majority of the factory workforce. They didn’t have many other options. Managers at companies like Foxconn preferred to hire women because they believed them to be more obedient, Jenny Chan, a sociologist at Hong Kong Polytechnic University who studies labor issues at Foxconn, told Rest of World. Over the past 30 years, that’s changed. Today, most of China’s iPhone workers are men; women have moved into less arduous service sector jobs. But in India, Foxconn and other electronics manufacturers are once again recruiting from a female workforce beginning to migrate for better jobs. Hiring a young, female workforce in India comes with its own requirements — which include reassuring doting parents about the safety of their daughters. The company offers workers free food, lodging, and buses to ensure a safe commute at all hours of the day. On days off, women who live in Foxconn hostels have a 6 p.m. curfew; permission is required to spend the night elsewhere. “[If] they go out and not return by a specific time, their parents would be informed,” a former Foxconn HR manager told Rest of World. “[That’s how] they offer trust to their parents.”