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The best Chinese RAM on the market is 50% larger and requires more power and thus emits more heat, as it is a 16nm feature size. If they can get to competitive sizes, then of course data centers will purchase it.
I get lots of "load bearing", "seam", and "payoff"
When I saw the design, I thought "This looks like a Tesla".
I'm sure it's an awesome car, and also a high quality premium experience. The question is whether it can command supercar prices - they are selling it for $650,000, and I don't quite understand the value proposition of a superior Tesla selling for that much.
Now you can say, well what is the value proposition of the other ICE Ferraris selling for that much? And that's the point, when they first came out, they didn't sell for such high prices, it was a long period of decades in which collectors were bidding up the prices due to their interest in collecting Ferraris and reselling them, at which point the cars became an investment and collectible item, rather than just "expensive high end vehicles".
So when you break from that tradition, but assume you can carry over the collector premium -- particularly for a disposable tech-heavy EV -- then that is where Ferrari made a mistake, and not only Ferrari, but there is a reason none of the EV supercars have sold well, or will sell well. Tech and collectables don't mix.
If you want an example of a brand that is doing this well, look at Rolls Royce. Rolls is selling actual luxury experiences, and their prices reflect the unique ownership experience, not the collectible value, as all Rolls Royces suffer massive depreciation, and have always suffered massive depreciation. No one buys a Rolls Royce expecting it to go up in value, it's understood that in 30 years, you can pick it up for less than the cost of the tires on the brand new model. In that environment, EVs work very well, and Rolls is having success with their high priced EVs that none of the automakers are having in the hypercar market.
What is a good TV show that is on today (or was, say, within the last couple of years)? I'm looking for recommendations.
Exactly. The mechanism by which the price ends up as X plus margin is just competition. Others enter the market and compete with you until the returns are driven down to the rental rate of capital. Any barriers to entry result in higher margins.
But that is an equilibrium result, and famously does not apply to monopolies, where elasticity of substitution will determine the premium over the rental rate of capital.
Yes, search and summarization is where LLMs shine. I use them all the time for that, and much less for code generation. I would say search > summarization > debugging > code gen/image gen
The vast majority of offroad equipment is not farm equipment but operates in urban environments. As NOx is an air pollution concern, there should be different regimes for rural areas versus urban areas. Construction equipment operating in urban areas is different from a tractor on a farm.
These are regulations, not laws, and can be changed fairly easily. E.g the EPA recently changed the rules requiring NOx sensors and power downs, which were the most failure prone components of the system, while still mandating the actual equipment that scrubs NOx.
There's no particular reason why a mechanical device needs computers for emissions, as the emissions removing components can still be attached and managed via simpler means. All emissions removing components are effectively physical devices, whether you are talking about carbon filters or PCV valves or particulate filters or the urea fluids that are added to the fuel. None of them requires complex software in order to function. There is no reason why you need to buy an official John Deere branded emissions component that is software locked to tractor and costs 10x the price of third party components that do the same thing.
Also, there is a large room to maneuver between "I want a sensor with some circuitry in it" and "the entire tractor is a proprietary computer with locked down parts". The right to repair movement is not about removing tech, but removing unnecessary proprietary tech that is designed to prevent owners of devices from repairing those devices themselves or with third party components.
There is not 30% inflation in any region. Not even 15%.
I think you have to go back to the civil war era and greenback inflation to find numbers like that in any region.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...
People forget that you could buy Ferrari's in the 60s for 7-18K. 7K was the entry Ferrari. Average new car price in 1967 was $3000, so the entry Ferrari was 2.3 times the average new car price.
Today the average new car price in the US is 50K. That would make an entry Ferrari 115K, but the cheapest new Ferrari is the Roma at 225K, or double that.
Ferrari used to be more accessible, but we had compressed incomes then, the rich weren't so far from the middle as they are now. Similarly in 1967 a bottle of Channel no 5 cost $15, but today it is $200. According to inflation, it should be $140, so again roughly double the spread.
I think this has to be done with technological advances that makes things cheaper, not charging more.
I understand why they have to charge more, but not many are gonna be able to afford even $100 a month, and that doesn't seem to be sufficient.
It has to come with some combination of better algorithms or better hardware.
Apple didn't use to be a status symbol. I think they earned it. And the fact that they are going all in on Neo tells me they don't care about the status symbol part as much as the profit maximizing. Let me know when Ferrari sells an affordable car.
That is a unique view of what happened in Vietnam.
But let's look at a more modern example that makes your case: Syria. The US starved that country, seizing the food and oil, funding/arming terror groups - not just the kurds but also Al Nusra and other islamic terror groups, invading portions of the country and placing military bases there to give air support to terror operations and maintain control of the oil wells, blowing up pipelines, for over a decade. Finally after years of starvation and hyperinflation, the government collapsed as the generals were bribed by Qatar (or the Qataris were just intermediaries, we don't know) to lay down their arms and let the Jolani regime take over. When you are convinced your nation doesn't have a future, suitcases of cash and exit visas to mansions in London do wonders.
So yeah, you can punish a nation so much that it is easy to take over.
But, can the world survive 10 years of the straight of Hormuz being closed? I doubt it. Syria was a small country and it held out for a decade. Sure, it had help from Russia and China, but so does Iran now. When the US was strangling Syria, we already controlled the oil and food producing regions of the country. But there is no such arrangement in Iran, and Syria was not able to close off a major shipping lane like Iran can.
So I am skeptical that the US can outlast Iran and inflict enough misery on them to overthrow the region before this Iran adventure is brought to a close by world oil prices and US domestic political unrest.
The EIA is where Ember gets its data from.
It's where everybody gets their data from. Because they have thousands of employees collecting data. These are professionals, like the people at BEA, HUD, NIST, etc.
Ember, on the other hand, is a "decarbonization" think tank. They don't have their own data. They don't have the staff for it. What they do is analyze/spin, and in this case, augment, the raw data that is published by EIA. How do they augment the EIA data? All they do is round it to the nearest 2 decimals. It's exact copy and paste for every month except the last two, where the data is just made up.
And this entire article was written based on the augmentations by Ember, yet Ember cites it as EIA data. So let's check back in July, when EIA data will be out, and Ember will use that exact data, rounding it to the nearest 2 decimals. Save that blog page!
Something to think about.
I forgot all about the Apple car when assessing Tim's legacy, too.
I guess if you are gonna fail, fail so deeply that it doesn't affect your legacy :P
Gas is certainly bifurcated. The west coast is paying up to $5.80 and Texas/midwest are paying $3.20 or so. NY and New England is paying a lot, but from Virginia on down, they are paying less. All the midwest is paying close to texas prices except Illinois, which is paying California prices.
Some of that is differences in taxes, but some of it is due to getting gas from different sources. If we had a pipeline from Texas to CA, there would be less bifurcation.
In terms of food being bifurcated, that too is happening, but to a smaller degree.
Basically the entire West coast is suffering from high inflation.
Except that didn't happen, and it's not a milestone.
First, you are confusing share of electricity generation with the share of all energy. Electricity is only 21% of all energy. Natgas, oil and coal are crushing it in that remaining 79%.
Second, the article is wrong, even for electricity. To their credit, Canary Media showed in their graph that this data is for electricity only.
The data for March is not out yet. Here is the latest official data from the EIA. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/
It only applies to January 2026, and the next release is April 23, and then you will get data for February 2026. All data has a 2 month time lag. Your spidey senses should have been tingling if an article published April 10 claimed to have data for the month of March, but this is why you don't get your statistics from activist blogs, but from official sources.
So if they are not accessing the official data, what are they accessing? They claim that their source is "Ember", but what is Ember? It is an environmentalist think tank. Well, maybe Ember has their own people calling up power companies and compiling data faster than the EIA. That would be pretty, cool, right?
Except they don't. Look at Ember's page.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
what do they cite as their data source: EIA.
It's right on the website.
So Ember is just pulling EIA data, and then filling the last two months with data they made up, but citing it as EIA data. And this, uh, sympathetic adjustment of EIA data is why Canary Media turns to Ember rather than directly pulling from EIA.
I guarantee you that by July, those adjustments will go away, because then the EIA data will be out.
Of course everyone else will have forgotten by then.
$3 a gallon is less than a dollar per liter. Do you live in Saudi Arabia or a gulf state?
Here are historical real (inflation adjusted) gas prices for the US. You can decide how terrible this is:
No, not even close.
US energy sources for 2024 (last year for which we have data):
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and...
natgas: 38%
oil: 35%
coal: 10%
all renewables: 9%
nuclear: 8%
biofuels: 2.6
wood: 1.9
wind: 1.6
solar: 1.4
Hydro: 0.8
waste: 0.4
geothermal: 0.1
Is purchasing a house consumption?
Why do you think this bridge is vital when there is a land bridge (Kherson) with multiple rail links all in Russian controlled territory containing the entry and exit points of the bridge?
Plus these things have a range of about 50 miles. It's not like if you are a carrier floating in the pacific, you will be swarmed with a thousand torpedoes. To launch one requires a submarine, and while one may hide, it's not so easy to penetrate the defenses of a carrier group in the middle of the pacific.
Ukraine has had success against mostly unarmored and a few lightly armored Russian ships (and let's face it, these are small ships compared to carriers) in the black sea because the front lines are there and they can launch from a port, travel 5 miles, and hit one of these ships. That's a completely different situation.
Yes, and surge requirements are generally quadruple of the normal runtime, but with lead-time. Still, no way we can train pilots at a rate of even 1 pilot every 1.5 days. And imagine the lead times on that!
Toward the end of WW2, even though the US and UK were turning German cities into rubble, the manufacture of german planes was still so great that empty planes sat around in warehouses because they could not find pilots to fly them.
That is why autonomous drones are very promising, because for manned flight, you will run out of pilots long, long, long, before you run out of planes. I don't think it's ever happened, that a nation with a large air force ran out of planes before running out of pilots.
So complaining about manufacturing capacity of planes is a bit goofy. I'd worry about surge capacity of things that are not gated by human operators. And only in the context of a regional war of choice overseas, since we'd just nuke anyone who tried to invade us at home.
Once you understand these constraints, you can better interpret why US production is allocated the way it is.
Wargames for things that will never happen is not a good reason to build more planes now, in the real world.
There are over 1300 F35s in service, 500 in the US and the rest with various allies. It is the most successful weapons system in the last century.
And you want to build more of them? Because of a wargame?
ASML's largest shareholder is Intel, and they rely on a supply chain from American, German, and other western European countries, all on the US leash.
But more importantly, ASML does exactly what America tells them to do.
And Europe for the most part does as well.
Sorry, I wish Europe had the fortitude to not be subordinated to the US, but that's how it is.
The problem here is that gas prices have bifurcated to the point that an "average" doesn't mean much. I'm pretty sure I know how California will vote regardless of the gas price, but gas in Texas and much of the midwest will remain cheap.
This map should be eye opening. https://gasprices.aaa.com/
What do you mean by "losing TSMC"? It's not ours.
Do you know what does belong to the west? ASML. What makes TSMC actually work.
I get what you are saying, and I was sympathetic to this view in the Ukraine war (where we gave orders of magnitude more munitions than have been spent on Iran).
At that time, I believed it "We are running out of missiles, we are running out of shells", etc.
But it turns out the US adapted. They increased production, they substituted for next best options, they got other countries to produce for us, and still we have not run out. Not after years of Ukraine.
So I am no longer on the "US is running out of munitions" bandwagon. Plus, this military spending increases productive capacity.
I agree, political exhaustion is the real constraint.
I personally would not be willing to do anything to defend Taiwan from China. But then again, I don't support any of the wars we fought in the middle east, either.