Linked List: January 3, 2025

Friday, 3 January 2025

Kelly Hooper, reporting for Politico on 9 January 2021:

The Biden Inaugural Committee on Saturday released its list of donors, which included Google, Microsoft, Boeing and several other major corporations. The list contains all contributors who donated more than $200 to President-elect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony and related activities.

That website is now defunct, and the “bideninaugural.org” domain redirects (for the next 17 days) to “www.whitehouse.gov”, but Internet Archive has a capture from Inauguration Day, 20 January 2021.

Apple is not listed, and while there is a “Tim Cook” on the list, he’s listed as residing in Michigan. [Update 11 January 2025: The Biden Inaugural Committee’s eventual filing with the FEC did list Apple Inc. as a donor, for a grand total of $43,200. Times were tight for Apple in 2020, perhaps.]

All “great American traditions” have to start somewhere, and perhaps Tim Cook — the one from California, by way of Alabama — believes the great American tradition of donating money to presidential inaugural committees is only beginning now. Or, giving him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he only saw fit to contribute $199 to Biden’s inauguration and thus wasn’t listed, and bumped his donation by $999,801 this time. You know, for “unity”.

(Thanks to reader Daniel Streicher for the link.)

‘Don’t You Think We Should Maybe Ask for More Than a Million Dollars? A Million Dollars Isn’t Exactly a Lot of Money These Days.’ ★

Hard not to think of this clip today, re: an egomaniacal villain, whose worldview is frozen several decades in the past, setting the terms for an extortion racket.

Axios: Tim Cook Donates $1 Million to Trump Inauguration ★

Axios co-founder Mike Allen:

Apple CEO Tim Cook will personally donate $1 million to President-elect Trump’s inaugural committee, sources with knowledge of the donation tell Axios. [...]

Cook, a proud Alabama native, believes the inauguration is a great American tradition, and is donating to the inauguration in the spirit of unity, the sources said. The company is not expected to give.

Donald Trump tried to overthrow the legitimate results of the 2020 election to remain in office, and as part of his efforts, inspired a violent mob of insurrectionists to invade the U.S. Capitol and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

For that reason alone — there are, of course, many others, but to me, Trump’s betrayal of U.S. democracy itself remains paramount — this donation is gross and perverse. But I’m not sure it was feasible not to play ball here. In times like this, realpolitik is the only politics. I wouldn’t have the stomach to make this donation, and those of you disgusted by this likely don’t either. Few people are cut out to be the CEO of a large multinational company like Apple. Sometimes you have to eat the shit sandwich.

It seems pretty obvious that it was Apple/Cook that leaked this to Axios, not Trump’s side, given the eye-roll-inducing “proud American tradition” spin, but more especially the nugget that only Cook personally, not Apple as a company, is contributing. That’s Cook asking for any and all ire to be directed at him, personally, not Apple. Good luck with that.

The Intricacy of ASML’s Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Machines ★

Fascinating piece by Ben Cohen for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

And there are two things I learned about the EUV tool I saw that I can’t get out of my head:

ASML teamed up with a German optical company to develop mirrors so flat that if they were scaled up to the size of Germany itself, their largest imperfection would be less than a millimeter.

The precision of EUV machines is comparable to directing a laser beam from your house and hitting a ping-pong ball on the moon.

It took decades for these absurdly sophisticated machines to make their way from labs to fabs. And until recently, it wasn’t clear if the company’s audacious bet on EUV lithography would ever pay off. In 2012, ASML was strapped for cash and sold a 23% equity stake to Intel, Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, which meant its biggest customers were literally invested in the company’s success.

ASML soon ramped up production — very, very slowly. The company delivered the first EUV system in 2010. Not until 2020 did it deliver the 100th. And last year was a busy one: ASML shipped a total of 42 EUV machines.

The piece is also a profile of one ASML engineer, Brienna Hall, who is one of a small cadre of frontline support engineers who keep these machines operating perfectly. The article’s headline, though, is bizarrely framed to suggest that she’s the only such support engineer in the world. The weird headline distracts from an otherwise fascinating story.