Comments to Steve Sailer:
* Andy Grove was also one of the many brilliant and high achieving Hungarian Jews of the 20th century.
If there was ever a group in the modern age to be studied to find any genes and IQ connection it’s Hungarian Jews.
* Noyce and Moore worked directly for Shockley and famously quit to get out from under him.
Another claimant to the title of Father of Silicon Valley was Shockley’s friend, Stanford dean of engineering Fred Terman, the mentor of Hewlett and Packard. He was the son of Lewis Terman, creator of America’s first IQ test, the Stanford-Binet.
* Another one of the “fathers of silicon valley” is, of all people, Charles Lindberg:
NASA Ames Research Center:
“The Ames Aeronautical Laboratory was established in 1939 by Congress as the west coast site of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) following its original site at Langley Field, Virginia. Advocated by Charles Lindberg, the Moffett Field site was chosen for its good flying weather and proximity to local universities. The founding mission was to improve U.S. aircraft performance and speed in response to advances in Germany’s air capability.”
A lot of companies grew up around Moffett. Fairchild Semiconductor was right across the highway from Moffett. Military avionics and radars needed chips and all that. The area is the heart of silicon valley.
NACA, which later became NASA, had an aviation research facility on the East coast (Langley) and Ames (Moffett) on the West coast.
* Trump ought to know about this. Ann Coulter tweeted these economists on Trump’s tariff proposal. They know about this column by Grove. Hopefully Coulter will put them in touch with Trump.
Cruz has copied Trump on immigration, but it will be harder for him, given his donors, to copy Trump on trade. But Trump needs some policy experts to flesh out his ideas on trade.
* Grove was the guy who had the insight that entering price wars in the transistor subcategories the (highly protectionist) Japanese already controlled was Sisyphean for global-aspiring rookies like Intel– better to compete in a different game where the cartels couldn’t draw on R&D wealth, i.e. patents. Politically he had seemed to fall on the globalist side, unquestionably more brilliant than most CATO seminar capitalists, yet still “fiscal conservative/social liberal” to put it in the universally recognized euphemism. Just watched Aaron Sorkin’s Jobs movie which, despite frequent snappy-repartee embellishment, was nonetheless accurate about his subject’s 18th century aristocrat-style disdain for the low-wattage grinders, not to mention honesty, human fallibility, fair play, etc… basically a guy who really disliked society as a whole. I think that’s more common in that milieu than the proverbial “evil Trekkie” ideology a la Ben Kingsley’s character in “Sneakers” or the underground diabolical cave-loungers in “Kingsman.” Surprising amount of bitter dudes who hated their own lives succeeding in post-80s tech.
* Given that there was no daylight between Trump and Cruz, Kasich, etc. on Israel at AIPAC, the only issue for the donor class is jobs, trade, and the hollowing out of American industry to the benefit of the donor class and their Kevin Williamson hanger on snob court jesters.
Grove was right, “mass” defined as enough manufacturers and suppliers to quickly and, I hate to say it, Agilely change directions gives China not the us the lead in information technology and electronics. China would dominate even more if it were not for the innate clannishness, short sightedness (“sure, sell poison infant formula and dog food”) and corruption endemic in China.
Ike in “Crusade in Europe” argues persuasively that the WWII American advantage was the mass of industrial companies that could quickly change gears and produce war material. So this has national security implications.
The reason of course that manufacturing went offshore was the Donor Class and specifically the Gentry Liberals. BernieBros … HATE HATE HATE manufacturing, not only for being polluting, messy, smelly, and dirty but giving Joe Sixpack a decent living and the whole point of being a BernieBro is to HATE HATE HATE the White Working Class like Kevin Williamson squared. Yes transitory profits were made financing new factories in China, and yes the lower labor and regulatory costs in China produce more gross Apple revenue for example. As weighed against half the factory’s output at Hon Hai going out the back door in the grey/black market. And huge delays in shipping product across the Pacific Ocean and often across America. And transport costs, not cheap when oil is up. Yes the financial class played a part but the Gentry Liberals purged manufacturing out of Silicon Valley to save the environment or make things nice for them at the expense of Joe Sixpack.
* One of the things the Republican party forgot over the last 3 decades is that while they were laying off workers they were also losing their loyalty to corporate America. When someone has a good job they have loyalty to their employer, and if that employer needs subsidies, or tax breaks, or educational partnerships, they will vote more often than not to support that employer. Democrats never forgot to butter the bread of their voters. They’ve been supporting the public unions with ever higher taxes and pensions. And supporting the colleges with public loans for education and and endless supply of students from overseas. Republicans as a whole forgot to do that, and they’re paying the price now.
If corporate America had more people in the mold of Andy Grove, then our tax and spending would be a lot healthier. And the execs could be sitting on top of a growing pyramid, rather than fighting a rear-guard action to preserve more of their shrinking empires.
* James Thompson: “The conclusion the authors come to is that to understand the intelligence and social achievements of people in the United States of America, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia you need to know only one thing: how much European ancestry they have. This is pretty much a consistent finding in their samples, but they look through many other possible explanations, such as the contributions of other genetic groups, the special contribution of tourism to economies, and the depredations of other factors like parasite load, all covered in detail in their paper.”
* Didn’t William Shockley do more to create Silicon Valley than anyone else? Of course, his race-realist views have made him a non-person, despite his winning the Nobel prize in 1956.
Grove and the others are Shockley’s heirs.
* Grove was old school tech – IOW very smart. His views are sadly the exception in Silicon Valley today where support of off-shoring and open borders the norm. IMS Noyce before he died was trying to lead a SV initiative to bring back some of the tech industry that already left for Asia, at the he was met with a lot apathy and some derision.
A bit of that story can be found Tom Wolfe’s book that talks about Noyce.
I do hope someone gets the Bloomberg article to Trump or his advisers.
You know it’s sad, I’m old enough to remember companies like Micropolis, Symbolics and Seagate having shops in Northridge back in the 80′s. Rockwell was just a short drive away. Lockheed Skunk Works was in Valencia. There were a raft of smaller companies like MDE and Space Labs who actually designed and built medical equipment in the Valley. In North Hollywood HP had a big presence. It was a great time to be in technology, jobs were plentiful.
It would be nice to see some of that come back. I know if it does, it won’t come to Los Angeles or even California, that’s out of the question. The Democrats are quite against industry of any sort.
* Shockley could have been a Father of Silicon Valley in another sense, as he contributed to Robert Graham’s notorious Repository for Germinal Choice. But, pardon the expression, nothing came of it. Or no one.
Other Nobelists tended to agree with Linus Pauling that “The old-fashioned way is best.”
* When the craptastic film The Social Network came out, the reviewers noted that the writer (Aaron Sorkin) and director (David Fincher) had created scenes where the tech geeks in Silicon Valley had groupies hanging around the offices and mansions doing coke and acting like stereotypical movie groupies–thus leading to the inevitable coked out-groupied-out leaders having fallings out.
Then people started interviewing tech geeks from Silicon Valley, including the Facebookers, and to a man they all thought this was pure nonsense and never happened—they geeks said they would have been thrilled if such things had happened, but women weren’t coding groupies.
That’s really all you needed to know about the awful The Social Network: a film purportedly explaining social media couldn’t get the lifestyle lived by the nerds in social media, and yet the film’s themes were that the nerds’ lives (especially Zuckerberg’s social outsiderness) heavily influenced how they created social media. Basically, Hollywood is incapable of understanding any world outside it’s own—where coked up groupies are in the corner of every mansion and party and office, and drugs and fame fuel falls from grace.
Sorkin really has become insulated from reality. Between The Social Network and The Newsroom, (as well as Studio 60 on Sunset Strip), it’s clear he’s so immersed in the extreme-left media world that he doesn’t actually realize how the world appears and works to anyone not a TV studio exec or a movie producer. He just thinks that a great sketch on SNL will change the entire country’s mind and that if only MSNBC ranted more about how great communism is Fox would die and that everyone lives through success like a film actor after his third hit movie. Really bad, insular stuff.
