The fabs will soon be delivering “16nm” chips. But they are not in fact 16nm chips. That is just marketer spin. The wire to wire spacing, the pitch, is still 64nm, as it has been for some considerable time. There have been substantial improvements in power consumption, and this and that, but chips have just stopped getting denser. There are no more transistors per unit area than in previous technology generations. They are 64nm chips, and we have been stuck at 64 nm for some time. (more…)
Archive for the ‘economics’ Category
Moore’s law ends. Technological singularity postponed indefinitely
Wednesday, November 27th, 2013Predicting collapse
Tuesday, November 19th, 2013I am a prophet of doom. There tends to be an oversupply of prophets of doom, and the proportion who turn out correct is quite small.
Equally, there are also a large number of prophets of non doom, for example the numerous prophets of complacency during the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, who assume that everything will continue as today, often even when spectacular collapse is under way, they assume that everything has now stabilized, or will very shortly stabilize.
So, I reach for the mantle of an accurate prophet: Ayn Rand in her science fiction novel Atlas Shrugged accurately predicted the condition of today’s Detroit, though her book was published when Detroit had the highest standard of living in America. (more…)
Hayekian critique of Obamacare
Monday, November 18th, 2013Hayek correctly predicted that socialism must be despotic, because it cannot operate according to laws, but according to decrees. And so we see the President issued a speech declaring his intent to ignore and unilaterally change some parts of a law, passed by Congress and signed by him, that he was suddenly finding inconvenient and then enforcing obedience on state employees, non federal government employees to obey his words and ignore his laws.
But, Hayek tells us, even this does not work, because the decrees are apt to be mutually incompatible. They cannot all be carried out. And so the Pharaoh winds up commanding bricks to be made without straw. (more…)
Progressives are channeling me
Friday, November 15th, 2013Not long before 10-10 no pressure came out, I compared environmentalists the French Revolutionary terrorists, and said that they would murder children for insufficient environmentalism, and then the revolution would devour its children. And lo and behold, they produce an ad depicting themselves murdering children for insufficient environmentalism, and then murdering each other.
Observe, the Obama ads for Obamacare: Now people who actually work for a living will fund your self destructive behavior! Is it not great? Obamacare is wonderful since it makes other people pay for your decisions! Now typical Obama voters, such as alcoholics and fat sluts will no longer have to bear the costs of their own decisions!
The only way they could have made the Obamacare ads more truthful would be to give the beneficiaries the appropriate skin color.
Stupid U
Thursday, November 14th, 2013Inequality, as you know, is rising (because of the mass importation of a low IQ Indio and Mestizo non working underclass from Mexico into the US) The progressive diagnosis was that university makes everyone affluent and middle class, so they would run everyone, especially women, through university.
Between 2000 and 2008 the typical earnings of men with at least a bachelor’s degree fell by more than $2,000, after inflation, to $70,332 a year. Between 2008 and last year they fell a further $3,500.
Falling rewards for a Bachelor’s degree reflects the dumbing down of Bachelor’s degrees, which is in substantial part driven by the flood of women in higher ed. (more…)
Murdering Grandma does not substantially save on health costs
Monday, November 4th, 2013All the intellectuals in the US who are officially deemed to be very smart people are officially telling us that the big problem with health care, the reason your Obamacare bills are going out of sight, is that keeping Grandma alive for a few months longer can cost unlimited amounts of money
As you doubtless know, most government health care systems around the world wind up murdering Grandma to free up beds: “Prolonged deep sedation”; “The Liverpool Care Pathway”.
To rationalize this, as we in the US increasingly move towards a government healthcare system, everyone is telling us that grandma is causing out of control health costs.
People 65-79 (9 percent of the total population) represented 29 percent of the top 5 percent of spenders. Similarly, people 80 years and older (about 3 percent of the population) accounted for 14 percent of the top 5 percent of spenders (Chart 2, 40 KB).2 However, within age groups, spending is less concentrated among those age 65 and over than for the under-65 population. The top 5 percent of elderly spenders accounted for 34 percent of all expenses by the elderly in 2002, while the top 5 percent of non-elderly spenders accounted for 49 percent of expenses by the non-elderly.
But what all that adds up to is that grandparents dying of complications of old age are causing only a small proportion of total health care costs. The article whines about how selfish grandma is for expensively remaining alive, but reveals that grandma is not in fact costing enough to make a noticeable difference. If in each year you kill off the most expensive five percent of over sixty fives, you save twelve percent. (more…)
Progress
Sunday, October 27th, 2013In 1900, there were no planes, no space travel. Motorcars were toys that enthusiasts played with, not useful means of transport. There were no computers, no radios, no antibiotics, no rockets, no nuclear power, no knowledge or understanding of the interior the atom, no very useful plastics.
In 1961 we had all of this stuff
Since 1961, what have we got?
The last man on the moon is getting pretty elderly. We have abandoned supersonic transport, and supersonic fighter planes are close to being abandoned.
Cell phones and the internet show radical improvement, but are just more intense and improved use of computers and radio, technologies that existed well before 1961. Genetic technology shows promise, but is not yet doing anything big. While reading genes continues to improve, writing them may well have peaked, and without vastly improved writing, gene technology is not going anywhere exciting. AI remains thirty years in the future, as it has been for the past sixty years, even though every desktop now contains more computing power than the human brain.
And, as I regularly point out
The last man on the moon left in 1972
The tallest building in the united states was finished in 1974.
CBO projects deficit under control.
Monday, October 14th, 2013Business insider points out the that the CBO projects the deficit to fall as a percentage of GDP over the next three years, neglecting to recollect that the CBO has been projecting the deficit to fall as a percentage of GDP for quite some time, while it has continued to soar as a percentage of GDP. The CBO has a record similar to that of Anthropogenic Global Warming models. Global warming models always predict doom, which never arrives, CBO never predicts doom, which always arrives. (more…)
Technological failure of the silk road system
Friday, October 4th, 2013Silk Road servers stored all messages in the clear forever.
The government placed malware on Tor exit nodes, located the Silk Road servers, raided servers, game over.
Private messages should have been end to end encrypted, existing in the clear only on the computers of the sender and recipient, and should have been deniable, except for messages containing money, where the sender needed to be able to prove that the recipient account had received a message with a particular hash, and thus able to prove that the recipient account received a message with particular content including payment. (more…)
On Fractional Reserve Banking
Thursday, September 19th, 2013Fractional Reserve Banking is not the problem. Term Transformation is the problem. Australia and Singapore ban substantial term transformation, came through the recent financial crisis without problems. (more…)