HN user
Software Engineer SF East Bay
Don't disagree. I regard Tan as a (powerful) local optimization where the counter argument to broader optimizations is that they're riskier. The latter are though more fundamental. New businesses, new processes, new products are one thing. Profit-taking is another. To get new industries you need far-ranging optimizations.
Unfortunately, an economy is now wholly peopled by shareholders, and the most important shareholders are usually the owners and corporate officers.
Software dev who's worked in both tech and finance. I don't measure things in just shareholder returns.
If you look at its history, Broadcom is a financial acquisition company that operates in technology. I think Tan's position is: these are (mostly) mature technologies and should be horse traded like financial assets.
Got lucky with the LSI Logic design team and Google TPU's. Presently $8 bln/yr I understand. Although such serendipity increases when you're able to buy everything you see. With the exception of Qualcomm.
Fred Brooks wrote in The Mythical Man-Month that it's harder (more time-consuming) to produce the software that corresponds to a given hardware. In 1975.
It'd be interesting to bring this up to date.
I wonder how much of this is about getting closer access to relatively inexpensive US energy in general and petrochemicals in particular?
I thought that ASML got its EUV light source, basically, by buying Cymer in San Diego. Read some of [0], and then searched it, but didn't find a single instance of 'Cymer.'
Watched about 20 minutes of Gringo before I got tired of it and turned it off.
Sounds like a textbook case of what can happen if you take a very bright person and then give them a sudden windfall of success. That is, derangement. He or she doesn't stop being smart and even charismatic and so on.
One question always is: what's the next act? No next act and the propensity to derangement goes up.
Maybe I should have read past the first sentence. The joke's on me.
I stopped reading at the first sentence:
"It’s a well-established fact that a guitarist’s acumen can be accurately gauged by the size of their pedal board- the more stompboxes, the better the player."
As both a software engineer and a guitarist, I'd say the opposite is true. Or at least truer. You can't do math-rock without a lot of pedals but the hard part is to acquire the chops. A lot of pedals, and production effects generally, quickly become cliches and it's like dropping down a musical black hole. Someone like Hendrix could take a new effect (superset of pedals) and make it work musically brilliantly but most pedal users buy the pedal to get someone else's sound.
Traditionally, you had _decreasing_ returns to scale. What's new with digital technologies is _increasing_ returns to scale. Very counter-intuitive for traditional economists - or even business people. People like Gates, Bezos, Brin & Page, Zuckerberg and so on have ridden this for all its worth. Let's out distance them as much as we can before they figure this out. Whether competitors or regulators.
That said, I like the story about someone observing Gates at, I think, a graduation ceremony where Gates had brought along a biography of Rockefeller (John D.). Did Gates know before or after the fact that MS had in fact used a competitive strategy comparable to Standard Oil?
Meaning, unlike increasing returns to scale that was something for which there was an historical precedent. The basic idea being: when my competitors revenues go up, my revenues also go up. A fatal long-term proposition for those competitors.
Big Tech got so big because digital technology is different from preceding industries in that increasing (not decreasing) returns to scale prevail. In particular, in software where marginal costs are near 0. It's a different ballgame. I think regulators have figured this out but for the most part it appears that they don't know how to act upon it.
The article says ARHGAP11B promotes the growth of upper-layer neurons.
Jeff Hawkins has this intriguing idea that the transition is all about the runaway growth of, in particular, grid cells which is slightly confusing in that the major place grid cells have been found is in the entorhinal cortex. If they're responsible for a vast amplification of the neocortex I'd expect them to be all over the neocortex.
Whatever the case, I wonder if the two relate and, in particular, just what upper-layer neurons do that lends them to such a vast array of applications?
Clearly though there was runaway brain growth at a particular point in time and I wonder how that worked in terms of Darwinian development? It's a striking change for what one assumes is a relatively brief period of time. Punctuated equilibrium, right?
I've never spent a lot of time on FB and with the interface change, I avoid FB even more than I did before. Interfaces with fewer, larger elements always strike me as a dumbing down. Companies that offer (insist upon) that may have the numbers to justify it but they lose my engagement. Meaning, either I don't use them at all or as little as possible.
It seems that's the same bay as for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, which with a population of 180,000 is Kamchatska's largest city. So this is very close to what amounts to a large population for Kamchatka.
The Russians have always been cavalier about pollution and, as much as it may be hard to believe for some Americans, even more cavalier than here in the US. Not the Russian people of course but their political systems whether Communist or post-Communist. Corruption, lack of accountability and so on. Then obviously Siberia is very large and very sparsely population and interested parties might think: big mess? No big deal.
Sort of like the intermontane west generally in the US. Wasteland, right?
The dollar's status as the world's reserve currency allows the US to consume at a rate that wouldn't otherwise be possible. All the trade surplus countries want that to continue.
Losing that status, or changing the institutional structure in ways that undermine it, would cause huge, wrenching changes in the US but might be for the best. But again, the surplus countries really don't want that. For Germany, Japan and China these are actually the best of times - at least economically.
Of the parts of the world, other than the US, that I'm most familiar with, Japan and Western Europe, they control drug prices - and keep them low.
I've had a theory for a while that the way world drug companies make up for low profitability in those markets is in gouging in the US where it's a free-for-all and one should grab for as much as one can get.
The totality of US healthcare is a big, complicated $3+ trn/yr pie but there's flagrant abuse all over the system (and a variety of intl players, profitably for them, contribute) and pharmaceutical companies are eager to be in on the game.
I wonder what would happen to healthcare globally if the US were able to downsize its 20%-of-gdp system to something on the order of Western Europe or Japan which is to say 10% of gdp? That is, the revenue the system generates would drop by half.
Needless to say, there'd be resistance tantamount to, let's call it, institutional violence. US doctors' earnings cut in half? You've got to be kidding.
Some serious diseases (this was true with the Pandemic of 1918) cause their worst effects, including death, through overreactions of the immune system. Evolution is clever but it's not perfect and regulating biological systems is difficult - even for nature.
How does this get past the FTC? Oh right, it's been a dead letter since the Reagan administration. Monopoly 'R Us.
Never mind the FTC - the rest of the semiconductor industry has to be [very] strongly opposed.
Sit at home and wait for covid19 to pass.
I read this intriguing thing once to the effect that: if space and time were discrete, say, at the Planck scale, that the infinities that bedevil modern physics would, magically, disappear. No more renormalization - no more many things.
turned the table back to the US
"back" is incorrect - not a native English speaker. Who says Chinese disinformation doesn't need to reach as far as ycombinator news?
I agree with little to none of your strategic assessment. China has come a long ways - it's no longer a paper tiger. Let's say it's now a reinforced cardboard tiger. China's demographic profile now skews _older_ than the US.
Actually if one looks it up (I have many times), as the Chinese industry was developing (meaning a while ago now), a large part of the key cell technology that China used came from a research group at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
There's useful research done around the world.
I think where German companies felt they might maintain a manufacturing presence was in machinery infrastructure - whether the machines that populate the factory floors that manufacture either cells of modules or machines (say, inverters) or that are used downstream of electrical production in a module.
I was last in this space some yrs ago but it's not clear to me just how much of a presence German companies have been able to keep in either.
One industry web site is here:
and if I wanted to ascertain German presence in the industry (including some aspects of research) I might look through this site.
I think China played a much more important role in driving down PV module costs than Germany. Germany was one source of demand - China has amounted to about all of the supply.
Germany has an important coal industry and lobby and remains a large user of coal.
Unlikely to happen (at least now) in a place that's, uh, culturally like the US.
We're in California and are in a community that was affected by PG&E's power shut off.
I think one problem in California is that since I first arrived in the 1980s, the population has grown from 22 to close to 40 mln. And given, again, US cultural proclivities, there's a significant number of people who'd love to move out into at least near-wilderness - but they still expect to be provided with their utilities. Some may be fine living off-grid - but not others. And there's no way, in the US, you can tell them that they can't have their cake and eat it too. Especially if they're rich and some portion of those people moving out into their dream home in or near wilderness are rich and figure that entitles them to having it all.
I assume the denser the population, the more it makes economic sense to put power lines underground.
The particular problem though is wildfires and they're more slowly caught, and can become larger and more destructive, the further away they are from population.
Putting power lines underground is very expensive - meaning, very nearly prohibitively so. Or actually prohibitively so when you consider that PG&E has to serve vast areas of wilderness in California.
Paradise (Camp fire) was sufficiently west that I think its own power lines did not travel through Natl Forest however if I'm not mistaken it was hit by fire from the east (pushed by a wind out of the east), further up into the Sierra, and almost certainly there power lines were in the wilderness.
Some low-end production had already been moving to places like Vietnam, based on labor costs where Chinese labor costs are now > places like Vietnam (and have been for a while). Trump's trade war has accelerated the trend.
Arguing the other way is that you have suppliers for, say in electronics, literally everything in places like Guangdong. So that's a disincentive to move.
KLP (according to Reuters) is the largest pension fund in Norway? Who anyway is KLP?
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=norway+...
I see: public employees. Public employee pension funds, in the West, are often some of the largest by country.
Norway's actual largest pension fund, the so-called Oil Fund, is, at > $1 trln. in assets, much larger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
It's the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world and owns 1.5% of the world's "stocks and shares" (as Wikipedia puts it) - it's a behemoth.
And how did Norway accumulate all that wealth? North Sea oil.
Whenever I hear "responsible this and that" from Norway, I chuckle. The ironies are rich. It's all fine and good to be responsible this and that once you're as wealthy as Croesus. With a population of 5.26 mln. people, it's sort of like a reasonably sized global metropolis came into a fortune well in excess of a trillion $. Bring on those Teslas.
Tesla can now, more or less, build cars in volume and that's great.
The problem is profitability and, at present levels of profitability, the current stock price is not at all justified.