81–90 of 96 posts
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Why would lower prices be beneficial? Americans already had the highest living standards in the world.
In 600 BCE some population had the highest living standards in the world. Was that the peak of human flourishing that we ever should have aspired to?
Fascinating article, thanks. > (There is a Moore’s Second Law, also known as Rock’s Law, which posits that the cost of a semiconductor fab doubles every four years.) If this were to hold, then in under 30 years a single fab would cost more than three trillion dollars, which itself implies a hard upper bound on node improvements by way of economic considerations.
30 years ago, Microsoft matketcap was around the same 20bi. Today it's 3T.
It would totally make sense for it to happen again.
Fascinating article, thanks. > (There is a Moore’s Second Law, also known as Rock’s Law, which posits that the cost of a semiconductor fab doubles every four years.) If this were to hold, then in under 30 years a single fab would cost more than three trillion dollars, which itself implies a hard upper bound on node improvements by way of economic considerations.
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In 600 BCE some population had the highest living standards in the world. Was that the peak of human flourishing that we ever should have aspired to?
Still have not answered my question. Why is lower prices better? Why would vastly higher consumption coupled with vastly decreased production be beneficial?
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Yes this is called a positive externality. It is why outsourcing produced much more devastation than was promised and why onshoring will create much more work than expected. The end result currently will likely be stagflation since like always politiciand do the wrong thing even when doing the right thing.
That's not why outsourcing created devastation. The issue without outsourcing is that the benefits are widespread (lower prices!) but the drawbacks are concentrated (factory town is now a hellhole). And our political system is incapable of redistributing correctly even though the net effect is highly positive. The seminal study on the topic is the "China shock" paper from Autor et Al.: https://www.nber.org/papers/w21…
More recently, the drawbacks have been far more global in nature.
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Most rust cleaner that you buy at the store is HF solution. For example, the one that teen used was 1.5% HF.
I can't believe that worked. Industrially (by which I mean how it was done circa 1970), silicon oxide and silicon nitride was etched using a buffered HF solution known as BOE (buffered oxide etchant). The buffer was typically ammonium fluoride; because of the presence of the buffer, the concentration of fluorine ions in solution stays constant even as some of the fluorine attacks the substrate to form e.g. hexafluoro…
Ammonium fluoride definitely isn’t as easily accessible as rust cleaner, but you could buy it for a somewhat cheap price on Amazon.
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TSMC has moved many engineers from Taiwan to Phoenix. Entire towns were built with accomodation, schools, ethnic grocery stores from scratch. It would be interesting to see this initiative's cultural and economic impact on Phoenix in the years to come.
I’m hugely supportive of the new factories and investments, but I’m curious why they decided on Phoenix which seems to be affected dramatically by climate change and incidentally has a very different climate and culture from Taiwan.
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> ancilliary companies any pertinent examples? r.g. schools for workers families ?
The show was talking about chip packaging companies to create the end usable chips from the silicon produced. Just for the construction work alone, they mentioned that the pipefitters local union membership has doubled since 2020. Refinery level complexity on the specialized piping needs for the plants. Special training programs geared towards the semiconductor industry being offered in the local Community and Trade…
Targeted investment! Toward future generations of chips, rather than of people.
One part really jumped out at me: Thus only a very small number of companies (currently TSMC, Samsung, and Intel) attempt to operate leading-edge nodes, and the industry has shifted to a “fabless” model where companies like Apple and Nvidia design their chips but have them manufactured by “foundries” like TSMC. By pooling the orders of many different chip companies, the foundries can achieve the scale necessary to af…
It is already true. The cost of training gpt jumped exponentially per model, in the realm of millions upon millions. There's a good reason why the latest gpt-4 competitor is meta or Google.
The stated tolerances of typical manufacturing processes seem to be off by at least an order of magnitude. Not that it does make sense to give a tolerance number without some magnitude it applies to, nonetheless, 0.125mm stated tolerance of CNC machining is ridiculous.
Off in what direction? A tolerance of 1/8 millimeter (5 mils) can certainly be achieved by CNC machining, but not always by the cheapest tools. You mean that it is easy to achieve much smaller tolerances than this by CNC machining? Googling for "CNC machining tolerances" finds at first hit a guide that says "For CNC machining, the standard tolerance limit is set around +/-.005” (0.127 mm)." The next hits show the sam…