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> Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Sandia National Laboratory (in Albuquerque NM USA) began building the capacity to design, fab, and test IC’s at scale
by palmotea 4mo ago
> Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Sandia National Laboratory (in Albuquerque NM USA) began building the capacity to design, fab, and test IC’s at scale (packaging was handled by Fairchild and Allied Signal).
We need more of this kind of thing, generally: government agencies building up in-house technical capability, instead of outsourcing everything to contractors.
For instance: there should be a government-controlled pharmaceutical manufacturer of last resort. The clear benefits would be to provide extra capacity and prevent things like Martin Shkreli's scams with Retrophin/Turing Pharmaceuticals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli#Thiola_price_hike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli#Thiola_price_hi...).
- rbanffy 4mo ago> instead of outsourcing everything to contractors. But then how will politicians favor their campaign donors?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- jfkfif 4mo agoSandia is operated by a government contractor (Honeywell)
- annzabelle 4mo agoSandia is not in house government, it is an FFRDC or federally funded research and development center, which are weird quasi governmental entities that are meant to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of in house government red tape, and the downsides of short term contracts. Think faster hiring/firing and higher pay than government, but longer term funding and goals than contractors. All the national labs are FFRDCs and there are a few others. My dad worked for one for decades - the MITRE corporation, which is a nonprofit, and interestingly enough got the first .org domain. They also run CVE, and do a variety of R&D and legacy systems work, most notably air traffic control. They also entered vehicles in the DARPA challenges in the aughts, though did not do well.
- palmotea 4mo ago> ...which are weird quasi governmental entities that are meant to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of in house government red tape, and the downsides of short term contracts. And I guess when I said "government agencies" I was being too specific. What I really mean is government should build up government-controlled technical capability, which could be "weird quasi governmental entities," state-owned businesses, government agencies themselves, or some combination. Pretty much anything, just as long as it's not a privately-owned business entity.