The technology industry is rife with bottlenecks

https://www.economist.com/business/2019/06/06/the-technology-industry-is-rife-with-bottlenecks

by mariushn • 7 years ago

84 40 7 years ago

economist.com

neonate• 7 years ago

http://archive.is/00oTN

mocha_nate• 7 years ago

Thank you

Zigurd• 7 years ago

In many cases, and even more so in the most critical components, there is no second tier of suppliers. There is no market for second tier components. Using second tier components would subtract so much value that OEMs in highly competitive businesses, like Apple or Samsung, can't even consider such substitutions.

So we can't "go it alone." That may be a feature, not a bug.

madengr2• 7 years ago

Sourcing high value MLCC capacitors is a real problem. I often design something into my board, only to find out it has gone out of stock. It’s like playing whack-a-mole.

laydn• 7 years ago

We made an item in our design checklist last year to avoid high value MLCC caps whenever possible. We also made sure that no designer can add new high value MLCCs to the component library :)

robocat• 7 years ago

Good high level history of MLCC (including graph from 2017 showing shortages): https://www.ttiinc.com/content/ttiinc/en/resources/marketeye...

madengr2• 7 years ago

Looks like the high capacitance are the longest lead, which is what I have been finding. 10 uF and up in 0603 are hard to get.

6d6b73• 7 years ago

The thing that truly worries me is that once these countries are no longer dependent on each other it will be easier for them to get into war with each other.

throwayEngineer• 7 years ago

Retaliation / MAD is a non trivial idea that leaders of nations should understand.

I only worry of a cornered politician or spoiled Heir that would ignore this.

kabouseng• 7 years ago

That line of thinking didn't stop World War I from happening[1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/0...

"Political scientists often argue that international economic relationships can decrease the likelihood that states will engage in war. Nations that might otherwise be inclined to fight can be deterred, informed or transformed by economic interdependence.

World War I has been called the “Achilles Heel” of such theories. In the decades before the war, Europe experienced unprecedented growth in international economic interdependence, both through trade and capital flows. Yet war not only broke out, but the scale of its destruction was unprecedented. Economic liberalism went into retreat. How could anyone sustain the notion that trade could prevent war when the most destructive war in history had followed an era of expansive international trade? For decades, scholars and policymakers alike pointed to World War I as providing strong evidence against the liberal case."

BurningFrog2• 7 years ago

As I recall it, Barbara Tuchman argues/describes in the Excellent "The Guns of August" that once precautionary mobilization had been ordered in one country, due to the nature of the railway system driven technology behind the logistics of the day, war was pretty much inevitable.

Nobody realized "the system" had this side effect before it was started, and once the button was pressed, it was pressed...

As your quote says. "economic relationships can decrease the likelihood that states will engage in war".

https://smile.amazon.com/Guns-August-Pulitzer-Prize-Winning-...

crdoconnor• 7 years ago

From what I remember there was a period of rapid (although not total) deintegration leading up to WW1 and WW2.

Retra• 7 years ago

By that same argument, murder laws are ineffective because they don't stop serial killers. And traffic laws are ineffective because they didn't stop a big pile up that one time. Earthquake-safe construction is ineffective because it didn't protect against the Big One.

You can't point at severity as an argument against a mechanism to control likeliness.

noobhacker• 7 years ago

The article you linked says the opposite of what you quote.

Right after the quote, the article's authors say that these claims [about Europe being economically interdependent before WW1] are exaggerated and this do not disprove the theory that interdependence prevents war.

pjc50• 7 years ago

At one point people claimed "no two countries with a McDonalds had ever been at war with each other"; this was I believe ended by the NATO attacks on Serbia in support of Kosovan forces.

It seems possible that the US will get itself into a conflict, possibly (hopefully!) non-total, that disrupts its globalised supply chains and results in massive US business losses. On the other hand, it's hard to see what any non-nuclear opponent could do to the US that would be more damaging than its own opiate manufacturers have already achieved.

boboguitar• 7 years ago

It seems possible that the US will get itself into a conflict, possibly (hopefully!) non-total, that disrupts its globalised supply chains and results in massive US business losses.

Before WW1 happened, people thought there was no way a major war in Europe, entangling the major powers, would happen because all of their economies were tied together and it would result in a major economic collapse. However, the war still happened.

mikeash• 7 years ago

That McDonald’s thing sounds clever but it boils down to “the US’s Cold War system of alliances lined up closely with its economic ties.”

the_reformation• 7 years ago

Were there no McDonald's in Iraq? Although that exception doesn't disprove the underlying point; Iraq is probably the most developed country America has been at war with since the Second World War.

rjf724• 7 years ago

It's interesting to see videos of the borders of the world over time. Contrary to intuition, the rate of shifts (often due to warfare) were accelerating over the centuries. Then, suddenly, since 1945 everything comes to a standstill among developed nations excepting the relatively peaceful internal collapse of some communist nations. 1945 of course being when we first detonated a nuclear weapon over another country, twice.

The thing that's stopped countries from war has not been trade, amicability, social evolution or anything besides nukes. The reason no developed nations ever go to war is because there is no win condition. If one side or the other is facing significant losses, they will retaliate with nuclear weapons. If that doesn't end the war immediately - it'll shortly result in a flurry with both countries effectively ending each other instead. Mutually assured destruction, as a term, always felt like it somehow missed some of this nuance!

The thing that ought actually concern people is the development of anti-missile technology which is rapidly advancing. Highly effective anti-missile technology would signal the return to war. This is why countries such as Russia have been developing things like 'Tsunami Weapons' [1] - a nuclear weapon designed to be detonated under the ocean that could generate radioactive tsunamis thousands of feet high. If that sounds difficult to believe consider that we have nukes in excess of 100 megatons now a days. Hiroshima was 16 kilotons - in other words about 6,250 times more powerful.

The point of this being is that I think this will help create a multipolar world and industry - imagine e.g. a new Chinese OS competing against Android/Apple. But I do not think that the current status quo of the world has been playing a meaningful role in deterring war anymore so than a change to a more multipolar world will advance it. I think it's simple. When we can't overcome nukes, we won't have "outright" war - creating an allowance for proxy wars like Vietnam where no nuclear participant's sovereignty is at stake. When we manage to overcome nukes, we will have outright war.

[1] https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-launches-new-submarine-believ...

ben_w• 7 years ago

If that sounds difficult to believe consider that we have nukes in excess of 100 megatons

No we don’t. The biggest ever was Tsar Bomba, which was 50 Megatons with the option to make it 100. The aircraft that dropped it barely got out of the way in time, and it was only on a plane at all because it was too big and heavy for a missile.

m0llusk• 7 years ago

Sort of. The social context has changed completely, though. In WWI war was still considered a glorious adventure for which the elites were particularly suited. New technologies like the machine gun, tanks, and poison gas would make sure any conflict would be quickly resolved. Given the glorification of conflict and woefully inadequate knowledge of how much risks had increased going to war seemed to many Europeans at the time like the most obvious and glorious choice.

Then came the horror of it all and Europe's upper classes had their youngest and brightest massacred and values changed. Warriors were now ordinary suckers and the elites kept themselves above the churn. War became a business of calculated leverage. It on that massive change in context that we changed together to deciding that war is not always such a good idea.

Then on top of that conflicts like those Vietnam and Afghanistan merely emphasize the baseness and poor value return of armed conflict. What was a sure thing before WWI was a daring bet in the nuclear age an nukes were only one factor involved in that calculation.

eej71• 7 years ago

When goods and services don't cross borders, soldiers will.

rossdavidh• 7 years ago

Well, it would be pretty easy to come up with a lot of counterexamples, principally because neighbors are both more likely to trade with one another, and more likely to go to war with one another. Every colonial war for independence was a war between two entities that were doing a lot of trade (the purpose of the colonial system). The entire colonial empire era was based on making war to enable trade, including the various European wars in China to force them to trade more. Japan was forced to trade with the U.S. by "gunboat diplomacy". The U.S. Carter Doctrine says that we will go to war if anyone tries to prevent us trading for oil.

Of course, there are counter-arguments to each of these examples, but that's kind of the point: trade and war don't happen on a random basis, so which one is causing or preventing the other is hard to say. Nations that expect to go to war soon, start looking for other trading partners. It doesn't mean that continuing the trade would have kept the war from happening, it just means wars are usually preceded by a period of rising animosity short of war.

Plus, the Ukraine's decision to pursue EU membership did not lead to a reduction of the threat of war in the Ukraine. Quite the opposite, actually.

datenwolf2• 7 years ago

I'm still royally $EXPLETIVE_HERE about Analog Devices buying Linear Technology a couple of months ago. AD and LTC used to be the mutual second source suppliers for critical components in lots of my projects. For almost every part AD had there was a matching counterpart in LTC's portfolio and vice versa. And often enough I could design my PCBs in a way that they even could be populated with either chip, depending on availability. Most of the ICs are still available in their AD and LTC variants, but I wonder for how long.

I've similar feelings about the acquisition of National Semiconductor by Texas Instruments (primary and second source for high speed ADCs).

rathel• 7 years ago

Ah, Analog Devices, the king of "expensive because we say so" parts.

datenwolf2• 7 years ago

If I had a lot of money (which I don't) I'd have started my very own analog semiconductor design and fab company years ago, with the intent aim to be a direct competitor in the market of high speed and precision analog and signal conversion electronics.

xxxpupugo• 7 years ago

Without programs like the Linux operating system or Kubernetes, a tool to manage computing loads, Alibaba could not have become the world’s fastest-growing cloud-computing giant

Kubernetes i could probably understand, but Linux under export control?

dankohn1• 7 years ago

Some useful context: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2019/06/11/cncf-openness-guidelines...

hinkley• 7 years ago

Hackernews darling Backblaze talks about how they were affected when the hard drive shortage happened due to the flooding in Thailand back in '11, which is how we found out 50% of all of the hard drives in the world are produced there.

The technology industry is rife with bottlenecks

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