The use of "3rd world" term makes me cringe a little even in this context. Isn't it more comparable to Boeing Conspiracy and Corruption [1] or even the Fat Leornard US Navy corruption [2] - which are indeed first-world corruptions?
Definition of 3rd world has changed overtime - but overall we can agree that; it now means developing countries with (1) high rates of poverty, (2) economic and/or political instability, and (3) high mortality rates.
Yes, above factors are indeed very conducive for corruption and fraud, but does it imply there's no corruption in "First-world"? I think the difference is it’s hidden (not as consequential) and some accountability come about sometimes... e.g MDHS Welfare fraud [3] [4], not to mention Covid related frauds.
To me the term has aged and similar to saying to someone "that is so ghetto"... which its use has declined considerably as a regular American vernacular. Another intersting term often used wily-nily with negative connotation of otherness is "Banana Republic" - which is very interesting when you consider the origin and who brought such conditions that led to the term being coined.
I didn't mean to inject "wokeness" to the discussion; for one I was born is so called 3rd world country (so perhaps a little sensitive?), and more importantly I'm obsessed with origin and use of words and phrases overtime as contemporary vernacular.
[1] - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-...
[2] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal
[3] - https://www.npr.org/2020/02/06/803399172/mississippis-ex-wel...
[4] - https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/14/us/brett-favre-mississippi-go...
It might be pessimistic but it -feels- like whatever happens here, be it coups, economics experiments, great innovations and the like - does not impact or even reach the rest of the world. One (mildly) rich Californian has more potential impact on the world than all of Latin America could ever have in the best of days.
This is a very natural kind of transition for words with negative connotations.
If you don't have a "developed" economy you're not as useful of a trade/etc partner than a country with a developed economy. Or your country is basically semi-colonizable then it'll just be semi-colonized instead (i.e. parts of your country become a gated community for the oil field employees).
After the Academy, Singleton elected to study electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and graduated in 1940, receiving both bachelor's (Sc.B.) and master's (Sc.M.) degrees in this field. During his first year there, he was a member of a three-man team that won the Putnam Prize in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, administered annually by the Mathematical Association of America. Another member of the team was Richard P. Feynman, a future Nobel Prize Laureate.For me, the sour taste comes from one of their engineers discreetly taking photos at an interoperability test event I was helping host many years ago. The NDA was clear. They knew what they were doing.
There is a 1954 prototype[2] at the fabulous but small Museum of Berkshire Aviation near Reading, about 30 miles west of London.
[1] http://www.hmfriends.org.uk/faireyrotodyne.htm
[2] https://museumofberkshireaviation.co.uk/html/exhibits/gyrody...
Real question: Does anyone know the meaning of suffix "-dyne"?
Probably why a lot of aerospace companies used it in their name.
> The "dyne" is the standard unit of force in the centimetre–gram–second (CGS) system of units, derived from the Greek word dynamis, meaning "power" or "force".
It is also a non-SI unit, but that might be too obscure — or might motivate nerds like the teledyne founders!
The resulting name is better than Leyland-Toyota anyway.
> The 1984 film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension used the name Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems for a defense contractor whose corporate offices feature the sign, "The future begins tomorrow". Yoyodyne is a front for a group of red Lectroid aliens, all with the first name John, that landed in New Jersey in 1938, using the panic created by Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio play as cover.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoyodyne#Other_fictional_uses
> Yoyodyne was introduced as a fictional defense contractor in Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963) and featured prominently in his novel The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).
Btw, Lot 49 is a wonderful book and chock full of little cultural memes like Yoyodyne.
That’s an interesting slogan, as I’d have thought that “the future begins today” seems more innovative. The future beginning tomorrow seems a bit of a tautology and procrastination.
I'm sure Russia would love to be worrying about specific transistor models in their ejection seats, at this point! (note, I'm aware of the pedantic point that Russia is definitionally not third world, they are just another point of comparison in this case).
This is true, and if you wish to be pedantic, or at least true to the original definitions, Russia is a 'second world' nation state.
Whether that aligns to what you thought you were qualifying, I do not know.
The government pays, but, you have a much higher profit margin if you just fake everything.
The people ultimately responsible for these things not only don't go to jail, they tend to make substantial profit from it after all is said and done. In a a matter of weeks everybody had forgotten (except I'm sure those related to the victims), a slap on the wrist was given, and we're straight back to giving Boeing billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to do the only thing they're good at: killing people.
On the off chance somebody doesn't understand the reference - Boeing is the 2nd largest defense contractor in the US, scoring upwards of $22 billion in contracts las year, after that settlement.
[1] - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-...
Can speak from the perspective of a finance professional constantly rolling his eyes at insider traders. Many people assume enforcement is far weaker than it is. That leads them to make stupid choices. For a period of time, during the Iraq War, enforcement was weak around military procurement. But the wheels of justice grind slowly, and I guess every generation needs its examples.
All the covid relief and stimulus fraud that's slowly being investigated is another example of this. All you have to do to disabuse yourself of the idea that law enforcement is weak is go to justice.gov and click news.
https://www.justice.gov/usao/find-your-united-states-attorne...
Click on any of the states, click news. Tons of covid fraud being prosecuted already in all of these places where small fry's thought they could get away with this. Medical fraud is another example.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdms/pr?keys=covid&items_per_pa...
Optimism bias is also a thing, they don't necessarily need to "want fighter pilots to die", but it won't stop some people trying to pocket some money ("it may never be used anyway").
If revenue is fixed, the only way to make more money is to reduce costs. Using cheaper parts with less/nonexistent quality control is one way to do that. Or even just straight up laziness. The "trust but verify" approach is more work than just trusting your suppliers to never make mistakes.
There has been problems with counterfeit chips and parts infiltrating the market for decades. The margins are also very good.
There’s a lot of potential problems in the world, but leadership doesn’t always take them seriously.
How long would the world have gone on thinking Putin had a world class military if he never failed to invade Ukraine?
I prefer the "Turn of the Millennium" myself.
So, obviously, it's a long standing problem.
At the lottery I had a $5,000 3D multilayered monitor fail. All it needed were 3 SMD caps at maybe 1 cent total parts cost plus labour to fix. the lottery just trashed the monitor instead.
USA corporations trying their hand at vertical integration. Normally they stick to 1st world tier corruption (directly buying off politicians) which is a scale far greater than anything the third world can imagine.
And it would be moderately hard to cheaply fake a chips that met the requirements of form factor, power and so on - and still was able to respond to some basic interrogation but also was flawed in some way (ie the way that cuts out the expensive bit)
Inwoukd love to know the specifics here of how fake chips walk that line. Cos otherwise it feels like "OMG any electronics could fail at any moment and there is nothing we can do"
A complex microchip can be easily caught. Simple one... Not necessarily.
Yeah, 1st world tier corruption doesn't take just one life, it fakes Weapons of Mass Destruction photos in the 3rd world to falsely justify the killing of hundreds of thousands and the disruption of the lives of millions.
But somehow, american still speak about "fighting for freedom" and act as if they're the "good guys", while they go and destroy another middle eastern country.
> 1) Saddam was a threat to U.S. interests before 9/11....He had developed WMD and used chemical weapons fatally against Iran and Iraqi Kurds. Iraq's official press issued statements praising the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.
> 2) The threat of renewed aggression by Saddam was more troubling and urgent after 9/11.
> 3) To contain the threat from Saddam, all reasonable means short of war had been tried unsuccessfully for a dozen years.
> 4) While there were large risks involved in a war, the risks of leaving Saddam in power were even larger. The U.S. and British pilots patrolling the no-fly zones were routinely under enemy fire, and a larger confrontation – over Kuwait again or some other issue – appeared virtually certain to arise
And probably the biggest factor:
> 5) America after 9/11 had a lower tolerance for such dangers.
But let's just ignore history and claim that there was no other impetus for war other than making accusations that turned out to be false.
I dunno, that's the intended interpretation from the headline, but the article doesn't really substantiate it. The way you'd see "fraud" in a never-used item like an ejection seat is that it just wouldn't have its components. The expensive stuff would be missing, which to my eyes would be the explosives/rockets, absolutely not the electronics.
What they found was that the electronics looked "shoddy", which isn't (again, to my eyes) the same as "fraud"[1]. More like "we can't get the original parts anymore for this order, just use this off-the-shelf transistor instead", or "crap, we stuffed the wrong parts, pull them out and rework them by hand".
[1] In the way you mean it. Obviously if it's not the specified part then it's not delivering the item ordered. But not really "3rd world tier corruption".
My only intentions when writing the headline were to avoid the click-bait format of the original and to communicate that it is suspected that counterfeit electronic components somehow ended up in an F-16. That is supported by this sentence from the article:
> Suppliers Atmel, Analog Devices and Siliconix provided the potentially counterfeit transistors, memory chips and accelerometer chip, according to the Air Force slides.
I have no idea how it would have happened and I hope I didn't phrase the title in a way that suggested any particular possibility.
I don't know if it meets the legal definition of fraud, but it will certainly get you in trouble.
I imagine Aviation is similar to Medical Devices and in that (my) environment, to build a device using a component with a different part than specified in the design, you need at a minimum an evaluation from an EE to see if the suggested replacement is suitable. That's considered a Design Change and the evaluation, criteria to be met, and outcome (possibly including Test Data), along with the peer review will all be documented to create an Engineering Change Order (ECO). Only when that ECO is approved and released, can you then start building the assembly with the new part. Anything else would be Non-Conforming and could cause you to have to recall all the devices that were built incorrectly.
Basically, changing a part is not a trivial undertaking. For non-critical parts, the process will be quicker but nothing can be changed without documented justification.
>The lab also found signs that Teledyne had destroyed evidence related to the case, the lawsuit said. Teledyne appeared to have replaced five microchips on the sequencer before sending it to the lab
3rd world tier corruption and fraud. Based on the number of failed and severely cost overrun military projects I'd say it applies to way more than just this situation