I just checked. Yup, you're right. Funny though that Pat of all people claims it's not dead lol

Moore's law makes no comments about the cost of each transistor in an advanced process. And believe me, they ain't cheap. It's not a coincidence we're up to PLC flash... why go for 32 levels when TLC is likely already a pain?

You wanna store a few hundred bytes? Print some mechanical knobs and call it a day. You wanna make some real storage devices?

Hire top PhD:
Physicists for quantum effects used (and parasitics mitigated)
Chemical engineers for CVD and other very hard and expensive clean room processes.
Electrical engineers to design analog circuitry for charge pumps and multi-level cell readout technology, as well as digital VLSI/HDL design for digital logic including storage controllers
Mechanical engineers for packaging design and automation for your expensive and dangerous production line
Civil engineers for your fab plant, which is so large that significant infrastructure needs to be built to support your fab (e.g. TSMC in Taiwan funded/built a municipal scale desalination plant of which a significant fraction is used for semiconductor processes)

Until we have replicators as the other commentor pointed out, I'm afraid we aren't even close yet. Fingers crossed we hit type II civ sometime but I won't be holding my breath for it.

Maybe it's a cartel but I don't have my hopes up. Storage technology is only getting more complicated and the number of players is only decreasing.

In my view (and maybe I'm wrong) there's just not that much money to be made in it, contrary to what consumers think. Why fight each other over pennies when you can both earn dollars? Maybe if China figures things out, but you can be my ass I'm not gonna trust a CCP backed storage company lol

Moore's law hasn't died, if you mean number of transistors per area. Linear scaling to transistor counts has.

Unless this is a matter of price collusion (which I doubt as it appears more as a supply demand issue) I don't think this unregulated capitalism is bad. Last I checked making any kind of products involving semiconductors isn't cheap or easy. Maybe it is once you figure out how to, but the R&D costs involved are insane.

We as consumers want prices as low as possible. Suppliers want prices as high as possible. Samsung (and the like) clearly aren't willing to make more of a product at the price that it is currently at (which is a mistake to begin with). There are plentu of other players making ssds, and the prices are all very similar. Something tells me that they're not gonna price things for cheaper because they can't survive that way.

As an add-on to OP, is it just my confirmation bias or are competitive games a trove for alt-righters? Never seen so many Trump supporters except in CSGO and rocket league...

his edit does not assume that; it's the cleanest way of doing the problem

P(failure second try)=(2/3)^2 since you can eliminate one choice but 2 others are still wrong.

To total:
P(failure)=(3/4)^2*(2/3)2=1/4
1-1/4=0.75

So the probability of passing is 0.75

Edit:
Remark: this problem is elegant if you attempt to calculate the passing as the complement of failure rather than enumerate all successes. Shouldn't take more than 3 minutes with a clear head if you know the correct approach. If this was an college level intro probability exam question, it should be done the fast way since it's meant to eat up your time otherwise.

P(passing) = 1- P(failure)
P(failure) = P(failure first try)*P(failure second try)
P(failure first try)=(3/4)^2
P(failure second try)=(gonna post in reply)

Hence my apology for the imprecise language. I meant what you said by social democracy, not a social economic system. Anyways, if we're being pedants, there are no true socialists or capitalists in today's markets. They're all mixed-market economies.

When I say socialist (and what is more accurately social democracy), I first think of healthcare, then I think of transit, then of education, and then of utilities. These are things that the US certainly could do better.

I think the reason is important. If you stick to something because you think it is the right thing to do, that is conviction. If you stick to something because you think you must continue as you have already invested effort into, that is sunk cost. The point that I'm trying to make, that perhaps I have not worded well, is that you must act with conviction, because if you do not do what you think is right, you either not do anything, or do what you think is wrong. Sure, you may be wrong at the time, and you should be open to reflection, and not be prey to sunk cost.

But coming up with convenient excuses to avoid doing what you think is inconvenient but right is not how leaders behave.

And in this context (if that is what you mean), it is definitely not evident that supporting Ukraine is a strategy that won't work.

Forgive my previous imprecise language, but isn't this merely a matter of semantics? I was under the impression that the major countries in Europe are socialist (or if you prefer, social democracies, hence what I meant but European "socialism"), and they drive policy in the EU. But as the top comment said, they have agency to do things on their own behalfs.

See but that's the problem. Instead of pointing out specifics and being clear you've said a whole lot of nothing and just gone back to your echo chamber. Shame on you, not for disgreeing with me, but acting holier-than-thou, walking away in arrogance with your nose held high.

Call me delusional, but despite electing an agent of Russia the previous election cycle, I think the US still managed to give more aid to Ukraine when they needed it. Don't tell me that the EU pledged more aid than the US has after the fact. If the US didn't put its foot forward in the first place I have a real hard time believing the EU would have done anything. And yeah, maybe we shouldn't be giving Isreal weapons to bomb the living shit out of Palestinian civilians. And Europe is entirely right when they call us out on it. But since when is Europe willing to accept refugees from Palestine? Their words don't mean much to me. It's always posturing and NIMBY and hoping someone else does it while acting superior.

For the record, the fact that Trump didn't overthrow the government means that it's not a dictatorship - need I remind you that Trump was 3 years ago? And anyways, despite how horrible of a person and leader Trump is, he somehow still had better foreign policy regarding China than Europe did.

If China invades Taiwan, what will Europe do? I have a hard time they'll do anything but thank the heavens they had TSMC build a fab in Europe while conveniently waiting to see what happens: if Japan and the US are able to help Taiwan hold, they'll open the floodgates, but otherwise they'll turn the other way.

Yeah, moving forward might be the wrong way to put it. But I'm not impressed at all with bystanders that point fingers at people going the wrong way when they're at least trying. And if the world wants to literally put their money where their mouth is, maybe they should be adopting the Euro instead of the US Dollar as their world reserve currency (why, if other countries hate our capitalism so much, are they so willing to eat our shit when we print money on their dime?)

If you move without conviction, then does it matter if you are right or wrong? You will never learn from your mistakes.

As an American, growing up I used to think so highly of Europe and their better socialist policies (I even wanted to move there), but honestly their spinelessness when dealing with dictatorships has really disillusioned me. Say what you will about the US military-industrial complex, or even how capricious our current aid situation is with Ukraine, but even when our international policy is clearly wrong or misguided, I do think we move forward with real conviction unlike Europe...

Well, if you count the corporations as people and give them votes proportional to their income, income does seem to be exceeding inflation. I'm sure in no time trickle-down economics will allow us poor folk to see some of that wealth. I for one certainly already see the wealth that my lovely landlady possesses.

I hate Apple as it's an anti-competitive walled-garden monopolistic closed-standard anti-repair evil trillion dollar corporation, but this isn't true. Modern iPhones have closed the gap significantly in hardware specs (display, processor, optics, IPXX rating, and now thanks to EU even USB-C) and they've always been better for general use in software. That, added with the fact that flagship Android manufacturers have learned how to play the pricing games of Apple, means that Apple's price to performance ratio is pretty competitive with Android phones these days.

Their main products are pretty good these days, as much as I hate to admit it. I've never even owned an Apple device, and won't as long as I can.

Well, capitalism definitely has a role, but it's not exactly a coincidence that China started out with cheap labor (and maintained it so). A country that manipulates its currency for specifically for export reasons is definitely also to blame. (Before you say but US also manipulates currency, the levels of currency manipulation are not comparable: if they were, BRICs would be our world reserve currency)

Anyways, new places don't go to China for labor, they go for overall manufacturing costs.

All that said, from my (somewhat limited) experience Chinese manufacturing is sort of a niche. If you're willing to invest all the resources into NRE and QC and not afraid of corporate espionage of your manufactured product, you can definitely save a lot of money (China really isn't all that good for prototype or small batch manufacturing if you need a made-to-order part/product as the headache from language barrier and quality issues are greater than the cost savings). Apple clearly makes it work because they don't care if you copy their PCBs - good luck copying their custom-designed ICs.