[PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth

[Keith Lofstrom]

Foolish politicians preach tariffs on China-manufactured
goods, which presumably includes desktop and tower "P.C."
motherboards.  This is intended to promote US manufacture,
although the only "manufacturing" most politicians can do
is the production of fake "facts". 

The Trumpy proprietor of one local computer repair shop 
told me "there are plenty of idle factories ready to make
motherboards."

"PC" motherboards are COMPLEX.  ALL (except PERHAPS military
motherboards) are made with Chinese chips and components. 
Motherboards can fail; I keep spares, just in case.  

Only ONE motherboard manufacturer, Corvalent near Austin
Texas, supposedly makes the circuit boards and populates
them with those foreign chips, capacitors, etc. 

I purchased two used Corvalent motherboards for my spare
supply.  I counted 40 tiny surface mount VLSI components
on the board, NOT counting the socketed Intel CPU and US
sourced RAM sticks.  ALL those components are Chinese,
mostly but not entirely Taiwan.  Most of the connectors
(RAM sockets, power sockets, etc.) do not show manufacturer
IDs, but those are presumably made in Asia, as they have
been for decades.

I've worked for (and consulted for) U.S. electronic system
manufacturers for half a century, and watched them decay
to nothing, not much better than the competitors that I 
could not help, due to onerous NDAs. 

Turning a potato chip factory into a computer chip factory
is a decade-long project (for example Micron Semiconductor
in Idaho), and requires the creation of hundreds of support
companies and the training of thousands of technicians to
/maybe/ produce a product, much less produce a profit and
a return on investment.  Intel in Hillsboro took decades
to grow from their first factory in Aloha, and that was
in "fertile soil" plowed by Tektronix, Floating Point
Systems, and dozens of other established electronics
manufacturing companies in Washington County.

Today, Intel is struggling, and the 300 or so vendors
feeding technology to Intel fabs are struggling as well.
Many of the tasks Intel super-CPUs used to perform are
now spread over a VAST number of handhelds, or are
performed by graphics co-processors like nVidia (chips
from PRC and Taiwan).

So what will happen if 2025 tariffs follow the same course
as the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930?  Those were supposed
to encourage US manufacturing and remedy the 1928 stock 
market crash; instead, those idiotic tariffs extended that
crash for another decade. 

World War II created demand, built new factories, and
enlisted 12% of the US population in the armed forces.
It also created nuclear weapons, so that World War III
will NOT be an option for economic recovery. 

( FEAR FACT: The incremental cost of one additional
mass-produced nuclear warhead is 8 labor hours. )

Anyway - things could get BAD for the next few years.
If the technology adepts of PLUG work their asses off,
we might be able to help our Oregonian neighbors endure
the rest of this decade with slightly less pain. 

I'd like to write "prosper", and share some product
ideas that would create jobs and profits, but if I do
so on this list (rather than private meetings at Intel
and elsewhere), I expect that PRC entrepreneurs will 
implement them and corner the market first.  I wish 
good things for those entrepreneurs, but I wish GREAT
things for my friends and neighbors.

If there are Intel people reading this, I'm ready to sign
some "conditional" non-disclosure statements to share my
ideas.  Not "for free"; I don't need to get paid for my
ideas, but I want my partners to train and pay hundreds
of Oregonians to develop them.  Not just more patents to
suppress other potential employers and products.  Been
there, done that, lost startups to patent trolls.

Conditional: if the conversations don't lead to action,
I reserve the right to share my ideas with more aggressive
companies elsewhere in the U.S.  At least /some/ of that
will help my friends and neighbors in Oregon.

Does anyone else want to help build the connections and
collaborations to do this?  Learning and long hours
required.

Keith L.

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com