Shenzen

This is interesting for those who use Ebay or certain other parts sources...

Low cost chip processing for fun and profit...

Steve

Yikes. Why do Communist societies transition so easily into mass criminality?

Nice.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

This makes the Mob look like amateurs.

Cheers

LOL.

Stuff happens. Those little vendors are a bid dodgy by times. I've also gotten lots of good factory-fresh parts from them.

--sp

Most people and businesses in the USA and the UK and in Europe are fair and ethical. You don't see volumes of counterfeit parts or adulterated baby formula or garbage products coming from Western-culture countries.

I think a lot depends on if it's a one time deal, or part of a long term relationship.

George H.

Obviously John has done a thorough and detailed study of hundreds of countries over significant periods... or he just decided this based on giving it 11 seconds of thought.

Not yet..

Jamie

No, I suppose he hasn't done business with you.

They've got the US as an example?

rces...

I can remember an unfortunate case where some Austrian wine wines were bein g adulterated with glycol.

That did get exposed. Big pharma has a history of over-selling drugs that d on't work as well as they are claimed to, and have been known to be slow to admit it when certain drugs have unfortunate side effects.

Big pharma can afford more and better lawyers than small scale wine bottler s, so there hasn't been as much publicity about that kind of scandal.

Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed" exposed the US car industry playing sim ilar tricks, and the recent VW scandal about diesel-engined cars is another .

Psychopaths show up everywhere, and one of the functions of government is t o keep an eye out for their activities. The Chinese political system still needs work - even more than the US political system, which doesn't seem lik ely to catch up with Europe any time soon. The US constitution was the very latest thing in 1788, but political science has moved on quite a bit since then.

Yet look at our standard of living, and theirs. That prosperity delta you see is not an accident.

Our system depends on almost everyone doing the right thing almost all the time. If they didn't, all that we've done as a society wouldn't have been possible.

Cheers, James Arthur

They come from socialism. They've got a system of legalized plunder-- institutionalized taking from their neighbors as a right--as their benchmark.

Cheers, James Arthur

Ick.

I got some production boards to troubleshoot from a client, shorted Vcc.

The audio amplifier chip was correctly marked, but something _completely_ different. Dead short.

On the plus side all the boards were exactly the same--they hadn't thrown just _any_ counterfeit part in there. (They've got _standards_.)

Cheers, James Arthur

John's obviously right--there aren't mass-quantities of U.S.-counterfeited chips. His other spot-checks--a simple empirical truth test--are spot-on too.

Engineers do things like that: we sanity-check.

So why the ankle-biting? Seems like a personal thing.

Cheers, James Arthur

Yeah it's annoying. George H.

You are a trip! The fact that Chinese produce counterfeits and not so many in the US is not nearly enough evidence to say it is because they are a "Communist society". Where are all the Russian counterfeits or the North Korean counterfeits, etc?

It is an idiotic proposition regardless of who says it. Where was your sanity check on that?

...and that's exactly where we are not, and Slowman approves.