That may be part of it, but as your parent comment mentioned, the Republicans weren't only worried about peak oil and being dependent on unfriendly governments, but also about climate change. Of course, none of these three problems went away, the point where fossil fuels will be exhausted just got pushed further into the future, and the fact that it will take more and more effort and environmental damage to get to the remaining resources is also undeniable.
But yeah, I guess your answer still applies indirectly: Fracking -> stronger interests by US oil companies -> money to the Republican party -> fossil fuel friendly regulations.
That's announcing 40k WSPMs of eventual capacity spread across 28nm and 16nm nodes. I mean, it's a start, and I'm sure automakers are totally stoked given the Nexperia debacle, but the EU will remain completely dependent on foreign advanced node semiconductors.
Compare to TSMC's Arizona project, which will supply 30% of TSMC's 2nm and smaller process output. Already just one of the six planned TSMC fabs in Arizona is pumping out ~30k WSPMs at 5nm or smaller.
And that doesn't even get into CoWoS packaging, which is essential for all the highest-performance and highest-margin parts.
The fact is: In semiconductors, Europe is getting left in the dust. Sure they can fab some mature node chips for industrial uses--and that's not nothing--but Smartphone SoCs, "AI" accelerators, DRAM, even boring CPUs simply cannot be made any more in Europe, and to the limited extent that they can, they will be horrendously uncompetitive on the market and outclassed in every performance metric by Chinese and American chips.
EU is on a big sovereignty kick right now, which makes sense given that their foreign dependencies keep blowing up in their faces. So it's strange that EU is so complacent about their foreign dependency on advanced node semiconductors.
Let's hope China doesn't get a leader like Donald Trump in our lifetimes, then I think your prediction will apply. Despite the political tensions, China and Taiwan are so deeply integrated economically that an invasion would hurt not only Taiwan and the global economy, but also China (directly and indirectly). The EU and the US are making efforts to re-shore some semiconductor manufacturing, but TSMC and others will probably still keep a sizable amount of manufacturing in Taiwan, so I don't think this interconnectedness will change anytime soon...
It seems that their leaders are and have been planning to take over Taiwan for decades. At least according to most of what I’ve read on the topic from all the various sources.
If or when China’s economic and/or demographics issues become problematic is exactly when the CCP likely would want to strike. At least seems to me like it’d be a good time to foment national pride.
Of course hopefully I’m wrong and you’re right.
Many of these larger geopolitical things are decades in the making. Even Trump’s Venezuela action has been a long time brewing. So much so that “US troops in Venezuela” has become a trope in military sci-fi. The primary change with Trump is how he presents and/or justifies it, or rather doesn’t.
"Squircle" is a bit of a misnomer, isn't it? A "classic" rectangle with rounded corners is a rectangle with circle segments added at its corners, while a squircle actually has nothing to do with a circle. It reminds me more of the way curves in railways are designed: one might think that these are circle segments too, but that would mean that when going from the straight track to the curve, the centripetal (and centrifugal) acceleration would go from 0 to max instantly, which would lead to a sudden jolt, increased track wear etc. Instead, transition curves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_transition_curve) are used to gradually increase the lateral force.
2 stroke engines on new vehicles were banned in India 20 years ago and there have also been some restrictions on re-registering old 2 stroke vehicles as well
you're not wrong they just solved that part of the problem already
Well let's face it, not on the same level but even four-stroke tend to annoyingly noise, saying this as an owner. A screaming 2 stroke engine is super annoying but the bass of say, a Yamaha T-Max is also super annoying and will transmit accross walls even better. And so many people run noisy aftermarket exhausts.
This is true in the USA where motorcycles are expensive toys. When I visit India, most motorcycles on the road seem to be very quiet in comparison. The constant sound of horns is more annoying than the engine noise.
For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably shouldn't end up in a landfill...
Varies widely across country and the type of thing you're recycling. People are so extreme with recycling, it's either "recycle everything!" or "it's a scam, just chuck it all in the garbage"
I’m relatively sure that electronics are not recycled properly anywhere. At best some of the metals are extracted (hopefully not by mixing the ashes with mercury).
That would fall under Reuse rather than Recycle. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle are in the order of best to worst. Recycling is the last ditch effort to not completely waste something. It's always going to feel like a half measure, because it is.
If salvaging 100% of the materials that make up something is the only way to "properly" recycle, we are not recycling anything properly. Some components are not recyclable.
I won't speculate about whether the plastic on the board is recyclable, or ecological to recycle. I don't know. This is what I'm asking.
I can't tell if this is a tongue-in-cheek comment or not, but all of that is shipped off to 3rd party "recyclers" who pinky promise that they will dispose of it properly. Very often those 3rd parties rely on other 3rd parties until the it ends up in a waste pile in a developing country, but with a long enough chain of differed responsibility that nobody can be held accountable.
The fundamental problem with "recycling" is precisely the fact that we just hand it off and don't ask questions about where it ends up, all while feeling great about ourselves afterwards. Bestbuy and Staples are offering accountability laundering so that you don't have to feel bad and in exchange are more likely to become a customer. The 3rd parties working for them do the same thing, but they usually want cash for it.
This sentiment is the case because very often that's where recycling ultimately ends, we just pay someone to move it far away from us so we don't have to see it when it happens.
Until 2018, when they finally stopped accepting it, one of the US largest exports to China was cardboard boxes sent over for "recycling". We burned tons of bunker fuel shipping back the boxes Chinese goods arrived in. The net environmental impact would likely have been less had we just kept the boxes at home.
It's strange to me how often people prefer a widely acknowledged lie than to simply admit the truth.
I always recycle though because the recycle bin in my city is larger than my trash bin, and I don't have enough room in my trash bin sometimes.
It varies very widely indeed. In some countries it isn't a scam because it gets burned like Denmark but other than that majority of recycling just means shipping it to a landfill in a poor country that they promise to recycle.
In Hungary it gets sorted out locally. We also recently implemented a bottle return system that (although it's annoying) produces clean stacks of PET, aluminium and glass, all of which are recyclable.
Even with PET, arguably the most recyclable plastic, most of it doesn't go bottle-to-bottle but rather bottle-to-textile. Because most PET "recycling" doesn't close the loop, so it's dubious to even call it recycling. That said, some bottle-to-bottle recycling of PET is done, and this has been getting better.
As long as the heat is used for something (electricity, building heating etc.) there is at least some reuse of parts of it. And if exhaust ist filtered pollution is also limited. Better than just putting it on a garbage dump and forgetting about it.
Depends, it’s hard to make a blanket statement like that. Recycled steel and aluminum for example is absolutely not a scam. But for plastics, I agree that waste incineration is mostly a better solution than recycling (which produces low-quality plastics with some risk of unhealthy contaminants in the few cases that it’s not actually a scam).
This youtube video explains why plastic recycling exists, how it's mostly ineffective and why is it a scam created to normalize one-use plastic. This basically applies to electronics and others. "Why would I reuse or reduce, I can buy, consume an recycle".
Yes, a jest. But essentially you have to directly impact the take home pay off CEOs as that appears to be the only thing they will change their behaviour for.
See "core charges" for many automotive parts to incentivize the return of waste for refurbishing at the higher end and bottle deposits for cans/bottles at the lower end. It's weird how things so common in one part of our society can seem so foreign in others.
Hey, if your entire business plan is to produce actual garbage, maybe you should be held responsible for making sure that garbage has a pathway to proper disposal.
Why recycle things that you can make them cheaper, with less resources and in higher quality from scratch?
(The above is not so much about processors, but about plastics. As long as we are still burning any fossil fuels at all, we are probably better off holding off on recycling and instead burning the plastic for electricity to use ever so slightly less new fossil fuels for power, and instead use the virgin fossil fuels to make new plastics.
Especially considering the extra logistics and quality degradation that recycling entails.
Directly re-using plastic bottles a few times might still be worth it, though.)
We are sitting on 5,970,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg ball of matter. We have a giant nuclear furnace in the centre of the solar system that's providing us with energy.
Some resources are still scarce. And a lot of those 6E24 kg is iron and nickel we can never get to. Another big fraction is basically molten stone. And we really should stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere.
Also, if you go for measures like mass processed, the weight of microchips, pcbs, parts is only a tiny fraction of what has to be processed and build in the supply chain.
Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly.
The world has effectively infinite resources, getting more is usually just a matter of figuring out better extraction techniques or using better energy.
The world only has effectively infinite resources if growth slows down, because exponentials get out of hand surprisingly quickly.
For example at 1% energy growth per year it would only take around 9-10k years before to reach an annual consumption equal to all the energy in the Milky Way galaxy. By "all the energy" I don't just mean consuming all the solar energy from all the stars, and using all the fissionable material in reactors, and fusing everything that can fuse, and burning all the burnable stuff. No, I mean also using all the gravitational potential energy in the galaxy, and somehow turning everything that has mass into energy according to E=mc^2.
From there at 1% annual growth it is only another 2-3k years to using all the energy in the whole observable universe annually.
Population at 1% growth also gets out of hand surprisingly quickly. If we don't get FTL travel then in about 12k years we run out space. That's because in 12k years with no FTL we can only expand into a spherical region of space 12k lightyears in radius. At 1% annual growth from the current population in 12k years the volume of humans would be more than fits in the sphere--and that's assuming we can pack humans so there is no wasted space.
We actually have population growth under 1% now, down to around 0.85%, but that only gets us another 2-3k years.
Sure, like effectively infinite atmospheric carbon sink, effectively infinite Helium, effectively infinite fresh water, effectively infinite trees ... we've treated these things as true, because the World is big and population of humans wasn't so big we've got away with that for a time, now those presumptions are coming to bite us, hard.
Yes, we can work our way out of some holes, maybe all of them. But we have to make things sustainable first, then spend those resources. We're not wizards, deus ex machina only reliably happens in movies.
The biggest risks are that single-use bottles are usually pretty difficult to clean (usually a narrow opening). The second biggest, which is related, is that those single-use bottles usually aren't very rigid and will tend to make small cracks in the surface as the material flexes which makes things even harder to clean. After that, all the cracks that will develop will mean it'll leach out the bad stuff in the plastics far faster than if you had some other kind of water bottle.
If you just opened it and drank the drink in it, there's probably no harm in filling it soon after and using it a few times like that. Using that same disposable bottle for a few months is probably not a good idea.
And you also need to refrain from breaking this scheme entirely, by introducing silly restrictions like only exchanging for in-store vouchers instead of cash, or demanding same-store receipt for original purchase (or equivalent) - like it happened in some places (e.g. my country, Poland) to glass and aluminum recycling.
Such restrictions seem to purposefully target poor people, and I have rather strong ethical objections to them (something about making a problem invisible and hoping it'll go away - or starve out), but the effect goes beyond that. Getting $20 back on a $200 product would be a different story, but here, it's more like $2 on $20, or $0.2 on $2; most people aren't going to bother with that (and understandably so: it's not worth the logistics overhead). So at best, all this does is redirect money stream from poor people to recycling companies. More typically, it just makes people recycle less.
Here in NY as a cannabis user, one of the brands available that offers vapes (Fernway) offers a recycling program at dispensaries. I get 10% back off my next vape/cart if I return the old one to the recycling dropbox. My dispensary also keeps how many I've returned on file if I return extras, so I keep a 'balance' of disposables returned for the discounts.
Occam's razor says it's less likely that the gravitational constant is increasing and more likely that the ability to withstand the pull of gravity decreases with age.
I read that fall injuries in the elderly are a significant contributor to both death and drops in quality of life.
When it comes to proprioception and balance one group of people over 60 seem to have equivalent balance to younger people and that is certain kinds of rollerbladers.
So as a person who was relatively active (40mi+ per week biking and other things) I started rollerblading and it's been unbelievable, I'm older and certain types of movements that take 8yr olds a couple weeks to learn took me nearly a year, it's absolutely amazing though, pain and soreness in parts of my leg and feet all related to stabilization, significantly strengthened stabilization muscles and improved reaction times at speed. I figure if I can rollerblade on one foot at 15 miles an hour, walking with both feet at 3 should be no problem.
I put rollerblading and bouldering as my top two 'puzzle' based activities.
Yoga is a great idea but many who find it boring are getting the same poses at 15mph and with more dynamic load and interruption (due to rocks and other high speed road defects.) There is quite a bit of overlap but unless you are doing acro yoga there is also quite a bit that doesn't overlap.
Which was specifically addressed early in the article.
Not only are there more falls among the elderly, there are more falls even fully accounting for changes in age composition of the population.
>>But an aging population only partially explains the rise in these deaths. Deaths by falls have risen 2.4-fold on an age-adjusted basis. While they have fallen among younger people and only risen slightly among the middle aged, they have risen substantially within every age bracket of the elderly.
Well, they very successfully advocated for their interests, and now the administration they helped install handed the EPA over to them. Maybe they should rename the EPA to Environment Destruction Agency, same as they renamed the Department of Defense to Department of War...
>> But then you get an aging population and all the problems that that brings with it.
> Only for a generation (mostly \s but entirely true).
That's not accurate. The problems of population aging are not confined to a single generation. They are structural and persistent, unless the underlying institutions adapt.
Aging is a continuing demographic process, not a single event. Once a society enters sustained low fertility and longer life expectancy, each cohort is smaller than the one before it. Each cohort also lives longer. That means that today's workers support more retirees. Tomorrow's workers will support even more, unless something changes.
It can feel (but isn't) like a single generation problem if major structural changes happen like: raising retirement age in line with life expectancy, shifting pensions to funded, large-scale immigration, major productivity gains from technology, or cultural shifts to high fertility.
> Once a society enters sustained low fertility and longer life expectancy, each cohort is smaller than the one before it.
I mean, unless fertility completely collapses (to like less than 0.5) then it'll mostly be a single generation problem. Regardless of any future changes, the current generation (my kids etc) will be supporting a much larger older cohort, with problems arising from that. I am one of 4 siblings, have two kids, and as long as both of them have two kids, no more problems arise (obviously extrapolating to the population).
There's some amount of irreducible demand for kids so I'd be surprised to see TFR continue to decline on a generational basis. Mind you, I could be wrong (or alternatively, we could see a massive increase in TFR like we did post WW2).
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