The value of gold

The fundamental value of money is exactly the curse of Genesis - work. Without the skills and knowledge of human work force, even gold is worthless.

If the value of all the work performed in the country per year is $100T(hypothetically), but the money supply including any gold or commodity used as currency reflects only $80T, there would be a shortfall of $20T in reflecting the actual economic value of US sweat and blood. That short fall would constrict the flow of economic transactions. It would be like a hospital with 200 patients but only 160 beds.

Gold loving "conservatives" would demand the hospital to not acquire that extra 40 beds needed, because that would devalue the patient per bed value of each bed. Their selfish laziness to avoid work would prefer the hospital to reduce the bed count to 100, so as to increase the value of the beds. They would lament and reminisce about the good old days, when there used to be only 50 beds in the hospital. They would say that the hospital should have kept the bed count at 50, regardless of the increase in population of the town and hence increase in patients, to allow their investments in the value per bed to increase.

In order to serve the economic flow of the collective workforce properly, we would need to expand money supply. Which would probably disrupt the stability of the activities of gold - but that is a collateral damage in the interest of a larger goal. But gold loving "conservatives" are too selfish and prefer gambling on the value of gold and selfishly seek to constrict the economy to stabilise their gold activity rather than the stability of the economy on the whole. After all, they remember Jesus saying, pray not for the world, but for yourselves - focus on your own misplaced needs.

Such "conservatives" ignore the commandment (there are actually more than 10 commandments) to celebrate the Sabbath of Sabbaths (which is the Jubilee) - because the Jubilee requires resetting the value of money and make all the manna they had illegitimately collected worthless.

100 shades of product quality

Sometimes we ask ourselves questions concerning the differences and compatibility between different models of the same product.

Underlying those question, is a reason why such questions would even exist at all. By explaining those common-sense approaches any manufacturer would take, it is my hope that programmers who write device drivers for operating systems would explore various possibilities which could be exploited to optimize the performance of the operating systems.

Product Binning

In the 1980s/90s, programmers were rather familiar with floppy disks. There were various grades of floppy disks. As an approximate illustration:

Bin 1 = double-sided 1.44 MB x 2 = 2.88 MB
Bin 2 = double-sided 720 KB x 2 = 1.44 MB
Bin 3 = Single-sided 1.44 MB.
Bin 4 = double-sided 360KB x 2 = 720 KB.
Bin 5 = Single-sided 720KB.
Bin 6 = Single-sided 360KB.
Bin 9 = Scrap, no or negative commercial value.

Did you know that all those commercial grades would come out of the same production line? At an end-of-line operation, each batch of disks would be sample tested and binned accordingly.

Binning is grading the performance of the same product line, so that they could be product branded to optimize the profit margins of the product. Why would we waste financially accountable resources by setting up 16 different manufacturing lines for the same architecture, to satisfy 16 different branded products?

For example, various Yamaha keyboards would actually have the same core, where an end-of-line operation would lock certain features into the core before they proceed for external brand packaging. I remember a piano teacher/Yamaha sales  person teaching me how to unlock certain features by buying a cheaper model.

CPU Binning

Semiconductor devices, memories and CPUs go through similar unified manufacturing process flows and end-of-line differentiation. Various models of CPUs of the same architecture would be manufactured using one single manufacturing process flow. Auxiliary differentiation of processes would depend on the contracts to be fulfilled, e.g., the type of packaging specified in the contracts. Those contracts could be agreements manufacturing have with internal marketing divisions of the company or with external OEMs.

As the wafers roll out from the same fabrication process stream, the individual ICs would be tested and graded/binned according to performance. The features for which performance are graded could include

• CPU speed
• bus speed
• cache memory defects
• cpu defects
• ALU defects
• GPU defects
• various instruction functionality

A unit that failed GPU test would be graded into a bin where the CPUs would be branded and sold as without GPU.

A quad core CPU failing one core would be binned as a three-core processor.

A CPU failing a set of instructions could be binned into a product contract that does not specify that set of instructions.

The combination of all these features should give a particular product line at least 16 bins if not 32 bins. Honestly, I don't really know.

Regrading Binnings

I recall at one time, I had to sign off down-grading a million dollars' worth of CPUs, by executing an administrative -3 bin regrading. Those CPUs were tested flawless as bin 1. However, the contract was flawed. The contract called for bin 4 CPUs. We had waited a few months for bin 4s to accumulate, but the process stream was so matured that only bin 1 CPUs were produced. And the contract deadline was the following week.

That was a costly contract and I recall that product had stopped offering any grade but bin 1 and 2 CPUs, six months later.

I recall my team having to retest and regrade a great number of units from bin 2 to bin 1 because company had revised the specifications of the product line. At that time, I recall thinking, "Is that even possible? What manner of sorcery did the upper echelons of the company do to pull that one off?"

Overclocking

Why is it even possible to over-clock the CPU that you bought? I mean, if it says 3.2 GHz, it should sit on its butt at 3.2 GHz and should not be able to run at higher speeds, right?

Besides the phenomenon where we could run a device at higher speeds if we spent enough money to drastically cool the device during operation.

Even as low level industrialists, we are obliged to continuously improve the quality and performance of products, by continuously adapting our processes. Our main goal is to reduce the number of low-binning units. The lower the binning, the better the product. The higher the bin number, the lousier the bin.

However, natural statistical phenomena have it that the process improvements affect the whole spectrum of a product line. To eliminate the existence of bin 13 onwards, we might have to improve quality to move the process median from bin 10 to bin 5. The median bin is the bin into which the most number of units got graded.

Let us say that the following is an illustration of a simplistic one dimensional binning distribution of a product line. Where, bin 99 = scrap value, we have 98% yield.



We could improve profit performance by improving processed that could move the median bin from bin 10 to bin 6.




Most likely the process improvement could result in the following bin distribution.



Where we have bins of a1 - a4 treated as part of bin1.

Therefore, if bin 1 = 3.2 GHz performance, bin a1 could be 3.5 GHz and bin a4 could be 4.8 GHz. But we would not know because we will not spend resources to test beyond brand specifications. We might perform extremity test of 5 GHz but that is actually to qualify the CPU for 3.2 GHz, performed at unrealistically low ambient temperatures.

Therefore people who buy an extreme version certified at 3.2 GHz could actually clock it at 4.8 GHz if you are in luck to fall upon that rare outlier.


The OEM

An OEM may present us a contract to test a set of characteristics. The OEM would specify the units to be unmarked and unbranded.

Perhaps, the OEM is hanging on possibilities of catching outliers. Perhaps, OEM is suspecting that we at times are forced to administratively down-grade bin 3 CPUs to bin 6 to satisfy bin 6 contracts - where because of our process improvement is of such excellence, bin 6 no longer exists in huge quantities.

Perhaps, OEM is writing a BIOs that could circumvent and tolerate a minimal instruction failure in one of the cores of a 4-core CPU. The BIOs might be intelligent enough so that they do not have to shut down any core but still operate the CPU as a quad core.

Perhaps, if one of the quadrant of the 256 MB cache fails, they would not burn off access to the whole quadrant which would down grade it to 128 MB cache, but their BIOS would run it at 240 MB by ignoring the bad 16MB cluster.

I don't know, as these are merely my musings what OEMs do with the CPUs they contracted.

1000 Shades of background checks for gun ownership

Comment I placed in CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/08/us/california-college-gunman/

Abraham asked, if 10 people were righteous, would you save the city?

That was the Bible's ancient treatise on statistical quality control.
If background checks eliminate just 10% of those unfit to own guns, would it be worthwhile?

If stringent background checks eliminate 25% unfit, would it be worthwhile?
If excruciatingly stringent background checks eliminate 60% unfit?
If adaptive stringent background checks eliminate 90% unfit?
If obsessively adaptive stringent background checks eliminate 99.7% unfit?

But you may say, we still have the 0.3% loop hole and bad people could get thro that.
The US Army developed these statistical techniques which played critical role in winning the war against Japan and Germany. But American industries refused to adopt these techniques - consequently, we had a whole class of experienced industrial statisticians left behind as information janitors.

But Japan actually won the war because those experts went over to Japan. Japan had quickly seen the light. American industries at that time believed, we only made 0% good or 100% good TVs but we don't strive to make 99.6% good TVs. It's all or nothing. That American attitude was devastated by the rise of industrial machine of Japan with no small role played by American military philosophy.

But in the late 1990s, these industrial philosophies came back to the US. Why would Ford have the confidence to refuse govt bailout? Why was GM so lousy and what would GM have to change? Did GM, in all those years,  implemented quality control in name only, when what was necessary was treating the quality enemy as an intelligent moving target.

In EFFECTIVE industrial management, we don't aim to eliminate, we aim to drastically reduce. We treat our adversarial bad quality as an intelligent moving target and so we must adaptively continuously modify our filters. We start reducing small and gradually tighten the noose (sorry for the word) around that enemy, until it is so reduced that it is effectively eliminated. My mistake, because in our efforts there is no UNTIL.

What attitude that we Americans have to change to drastically reduce gun violence, without giving excuses like, "well we still have a 50% loop hole"?

What is it that we have to do to preserve our privileges to own guns, which we can use to keep our families and communities safe?

Are background checks simply black/white or is it a battle against 1000 shades of mutating grey?

Is OBL laughing in his watery grave?

 Comment I placed in CNN.

In the current social climate and aftermath, a prank that would put you in two weeks' community service in the 80s, could now send you to Guantanamo.

I had a colleague before 9/11 who used to travel around east Asia. He used to asked, "Why are govts in that region so uptight about Communists? Why are Muslim govts jailing Muslim dissidents who spoke too much religion? Why are people who speak of racial issues put in jail? They are barbaric who don't' recognise the rights and freedom of speech. Why cane and humiliate a boy who merely went scratching some cars in town?"

To be fair to him, he probably did not know of, or experienced, the Communist insurgency, the terror, the racial riots, the religious extremism evangelists the govts had been sensing as being sent by Saudi oil money.

I would really like to look into the eye of that colleague now and ask him, "What happened to this beloved country?" The last I heard of him was his conversations seems to veer towards a measure of red-neckedish or even T-baggish.

Let me further muse the situations that OBL has made us crawl into.

• Democrats who support en mass phone line tapping.
• An annoying TSA.
• Children getting arrested due to zero tolerance on simple pranks.

I'm sure there are more.

The remote human drone

Comment I placed in CNN.

The next phase of human biological evolution is the ability to transmit our consciousness over the network. Which is already happening.

The situation is mirrored by current technology, where a computer is able to host multiple virtual machines - within the past decade, human intellect have been evolving to project avatars. The avatar consciousness is also evolving, so that currently human could choose to reveal herself/himself/itself more intimately.

To reject this evolution would be like the populace pining for physical pieces of silver, gold, bronze or jade when China invented paper money and promissory tickets. The flexibility of gradually maturing virtual money backed by royal or warlord's promissory trumps over the inflexibility of the cumbersome and unregulated activity of actually handling those valuables.

Or, it would be like rejecting the new found literacy available to the masses after the invention of printing both in China and Germany - where it would be like pining over actual physical contact rather than mass printed impersonal books and communiques.

In the future, we will achieve super-luminal travel by transporting our consciousness over time and space to explore the galaxy and universe after humankind has laid out hubs further and further away from our home planets. Wherefore our frail human bodies will never adapt to the super gravitation and degradation due to relativity-breaching modes of transport, even when we achieve the technology. We would have bodies ready-made on shared/rental at our destination of travel.

Embrace the change or keep the change at your own peril.

Muslims who kill fellow-Muslims to save their lives

Comment I placed in CNN.

The article quotes the London hacker as saying,

"We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone,The only reasons we killed this man ... is because Muslims are dying daily"

These men, as well as Tsarnaev in Boston, are spouting bl**dy BS.

Thousands Muslims die at the hands of Muslims. More Muslims are killed by Muslims in significantly higher numbers than by non-Muslims. Where are the prideful heroism for Islam in defending Muslims where it is really needed.

If you watch the TV series Life Unexpected, this teenage girl keeps blaming everyone but herself, keeps assigning reasons to other people as reasons why she misbehaves.

If these people are truly concerned about the fortitude of Islam, like Mahathir Mohammed did once say pejoratively - Muslims should learn to be like Jews - be good at what you do, excel at what you are.

Jihadists need to be reminded - that between 500 and 1000 years ago, Hindus, Buddhists and Zoroastrians in Persia and Southeast Asia pursued by their own freewill to convert to Islam because Islam at that time represented the elite in philosophy, fashion and technology. The Arab occupiers or traders had little motivation to convert those people. Even the invading Mongolian hordes converted to Islam because it made them look good and civilised.

What makes me believe is that Jihadists are actually disillusioned with Islam. They see it as a religion that is going nowhere. Jihadists are actually people throwing tantrums by killing Muslims and non-Muslims because they are afflicted with severe depression. They see it as being out of alignment with the world because the grand imams of their religion would not let it progress forward.

In that, they have neither hope nor understanding in the religion they are see themselves being stuck with. So they have no choice but to call even the most conservative of non-Muslims and other non-violent Muslims as evil and non-compliant to their religion. To feel good that they are better Muslims - the special chosen ones to punish the world - finding fault in everything to justify their need to punish.

1.3 billion dogs-on-a-leash

Comment I placed in CNN.

Americans and Europe have more to fear for a fully democratic China than an authoritarian one.

In an authoritarian one, as it now stands, the authority is able to persuade the populace that their natural state are dogs on a leash. So many of them, including the fearless Jackie Chan, accept that it is for their own good to be dogs on a leash.

However, have we ever considered what would be unleashed in a fully democratic China, that we would even wish to encourage that? The full forces of Confucianism and Taoism (not the religions but the culture) would be released.

Those are grandiose traditions - they see every thing as connected. Confucianism vs Taoism is akin to Sunni vs Shiite, Catholic vs Protestants. Confucians see things as connected by group mandate, Taoists see things as connected by fluid individuality. They both themselves admit that they are fire vs water.

The world will face drastic changes, when the cultural forces of a fully democratic China demands the rest of the world to see events, ethics, morality and progress in their perspectives.

Fortunately, the Communist party of China and Jackie Chan can still successfully persuade their people that they are worthy as mere dogs on a leash.

Read Jackie Chan supports suppression of freedom in China.

1000 shades of Alawi religion

Assad should save his people and family by carving out a piece of land and seceding from Syria while they still have the opportunity. It is really a very unique and adaptive religion that should not go extinct.

No doubt Syrian Christians would join them since they share many religious saints and that the Alawite religion is a syncretism of Islam, Christianity and Gnosticism. Perhaps, even Buddhism.

Summary of Wikipedia article:
Like the Druze, some Alawi tenets may be secret and known only to a select few. Syncretism in particular from Ismaili Islam and Christianity. Some Sunni scholars have categorized Alawites as pagans. Alawis are reported

• to celebrate certain Christian festivals, "in their own way", including Christmas, Easter, and Palm Sunday
• to believe Ali is (like a Christ-type) incarnation of Allah.
• believe in reincarnation.

They were long persecuted for their beliefs by the various rulers of Syria, until Hafez al-Assad took power there in 1970. Robert D. Kaplan has compared Hafez al-Assad's coming to power to "an untouchable becoming maharajah in India or a Jew becoming tsar in Russia." In 1971, al-Assad declared himself president of Syria, a position the constitution at the time allowed only for Sunni Muslims to hold.

Colonial French had encouraged Alawites to join their military force, in part to provide a counterweight to the Sunni majority, which was more hostile to their rule. 1936 letter signed by 80 Alawi notables and was addressed to the French Prime Minister stating that "Alawite people rejected attachment to Syria and wished to stay under French protection."

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Other sources:

Believe that unbelievers (including other Muslims, Christians, etc) reincarnate as animals, while they repeatedly reincarnate till achieving illumination. The Alawite religion on the surface continues to mutate to suit their survival. Their Taqqiyya remain secretive from nominal Alawites. In modern times, Alawite leaders have found it expedient to steer closer to Sunni Islam, at other times steering closer to Shia, or even to Christianity. Therefore, young modern Alawite would only remember their religion as had suited Hafez Al-Assad.

Sounds Buddhist to me - reincarnate until you achieve enlightenment if you are good, but reincarnate into a non-Alawite and then ultimately into the most depraved amoeba if you are bad.

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They should quit now while there is a chance to revert to their former pro-European days.