An unfinished civil war in which the Republic of China lives on in a tiny island? Damn, must have been a real stalemate for the KMT and Communist Party.

For the record, I absolutely believe China would attack Taiwan, when they think they are ready. And you don't have to take my word for it: what of all those missiles Taiwan posseses? Are they pointed towards or away from the strait?

As for being left alone, the only reason Taiwan can live in peace and prosperity is because of its strategic semiconductor fabs and the publicity it generates. Yes, the publicity it generates puts us the forefront of global conversations and keeps Taiwan safe.

Now, if you really are Taiwanese, if China and Taiwan are one, do you really think China would let TSMC do as they please and not immediately takeover the company for SMIC? Or do you not remember what happened to Jack Ma? You think Taiwan can vote how it wants while still being part of China? Taiwan is part of China just as much as Ukraine is part of Russia.

By the way, last I checked in December when I visited my parents, rubber ducks and Winnie the Pooh aren't banned in Taiwan. I wonder about Hong Kong and its one country two systems ;)

Lmao no that's not the status quo of Taiwan. Or maybe I should ask you what happened to Hong Kong?

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.

Well, the devil is in the details. People like you, who has actually figured out how to use an adblocker properly for YouTube, and me, who is willing to actually pay for YouTube premium (you're welcome for the subsidy), surely form a small proportion of the actual number of YouTube content consumers.

Maybe I'm wrong, but my view is that the majority of users just want to watch videos without having ads and they aren't willing to devote time (for adblockers) or money (for subscription services) and are completely ignorant that they are the product regardless. And those users act like they are entitled to content and that leaving YouTube is somehow significant to the big picture.

In a sense I agree with that piekay though. If they can't serve me targeted ads on YouTube they lose that money trying to develop technology to track me in that regard. How much money that is I guess is hard to say, since the tracking on YouTube certainly can carry over to other parts of Alphabet.

Perhaps YouTube gets all their content for free, but it certainly isn't free to transcode video, host it reliably, and distribute it while moderating it (given how bad Twitter is right now I'm sure they have a decent number of measures in place, even if they aren't even "good" at it). And if it was remotely easy, believe me, there would be a lot of competition in this space.

Yes, I make Alphabet x dollars richer (or really, I make YouTube operate at a slightly lesser cost) every month by paying a subscription. And actually, I'm okay with it. A tiny cut of it goes to content creators and I get a nice piece of tech. And I support the branch of Alphabet that has technology that I think is incredibly useful and beneficial. If there's a content creator that I like especially then I'll support them directly.

The reality of it is that things cannot be free. Or at least it seems that way, because we have not been able to provide a free video hosting service that doesn't take advantage of its content creators or consumers.