It amounts to spending 3 times as much money in production
"Spending money on production" is not the same thing as "spending money on silicon wafers". If the machine time is limited[1] and/or expensive and the die size is held constant, then obviously shrinking your transistors lets you do more with the same amount of machine time. Summarizing that gain as "we made the transistors cheaper!" misses the point in my view. The focus should be on the cost, output, speed, efficiency, availability (if third party) and IP status of the fab machinery. Shrinking the transistors is one way to make the machinery more efficient and thus cheaper to use for the same output, but there are others.
it amounts to spending 3 times as much money in production 10 years later
I'm not sure that means much given the mid to high end chips I explicitly mentioned that I was referring to in my last post. Depends on what they're lumping into "production costs" though. And it also obviously depends on their gross profit margin (minus all design and initial setup costs), which I'm assuming is fairly fat.
I grant you that it might be more important for generic unpatented chips than I originally imagined.
But despite those reservations, I still don't necessarily dispute the conclusion. I dispute the phrasing. If it's true that Intel can save a significant chunk of money for their CPUs by making their machines more efficient, then that's surely because their machines cost a lot of money to build and run per unit of output. The costs and output bottlenecks involved here are complex... "transistors are expensive to make, so making them smaller saves money!" doesn't sound like a useful summary of the situation. I could probably form a more detailed argument here were I more familiar with the exact processes and expenses involved, particularly as they relate to die size.
1. And once again, it's worth noting these limits aren't necessarily permanent or natural ones. It probably greatly depends on IP law, static investment costs for the machinery and technicians in an uncertain market, and various other barriers to entry that may suddenly give way. The expense isn't based on a hard scarcity (like gold), nor is it based on insurmountable issues of size and complexities (like cars.) If things change and a few high output fabs come online and we're dealing with a chip in the public domain... wouldn't you expect the price to plummet dramatically, even if the transistor size were held constant? Note that I'm not saying that's what Intel should do.
Again, I say go both routes. Plenty of people will want to pay the money to skip the line. The prime obstacle here is a cultural impediment standing in the way of the huge supply reaching the moderate demand, and this obstacle should be attacked through both the charity and the capitalistic angles. In some areas these two things might work against each other (like, say, municipal wifi. Or schools and universities) and you would thus have an argument at least in principle, but not in the case of organ donation.
If I had to choose between the aforementioned reforms of the current system and legalizing organ sale, I'd probably choose the latter because it will make bigger waves[1], leading to both reforms and increased awareness. But we don't have to choose. Arguing for the abolition of the public charity option sabotages your own case, makes you sound like your real priority here is blindly promoting libertarian means with the ends (saving lives) as a mere afterthought. I still consider myself a libertarian of sorts, but this political orientation will remain doomed to irrelevance so long as this tedious, predictable zealotry is adhered to.
1. The default opt-in reform, depending on how it's set up, could give you a much bigger boost in the organ supply but in practice I suspect it's going to be hard to enforce over the objections of family members, particularly in America. Still, it would be worth doing as a firm yet resistible push in the right direction. Don't take away rights, but force people to actually expend a little effort if they really, really don't want to their (or their family member's) organs to save anyone's life. This is something most people simply don't think about. Force them to think about it a little bit if they do want to opt out, and I suspect that a lot of current non-donors won't.
That's what I assumed. "Cost per transistor" is technically accurate, but the primary factors in cost are in the design of the chip, the creation of the die, the cost of the foundry and the time it takes 'em to create the chip (which is a function of die size, sure. Among other things.) As I've speculated elsewhere, if a government were to drop hundreds of billions of dollars on large, high-output fabs (while either not caring about patents or buying out the patent holders or waiting until they expire or whatever) and leave them cranking out chips at full speed, the costs per chip would surely be ridiculously low. The price isn't being driven by transistors costing too damn much to make. It's being driven by the limited quantity of machinery (and die space) and also the actions of the suppliers themselves, who are paying attention to the estimated supply/demand curves so they can avoid overproducing. (I'm talking about the chips in mid to high end electronics, by the way, not the $1 calculator.)
As far as the wafers go, I'm seeing stuff like $1-$3 per square inch. There's no way Intel is going through the effort of their "tick" phase just to save thirty cents of silicon for their $100+ processor. And I suspect the production of high purity wafers is something that probably also would scale up decently if there were motivation to do so.
So sure, you're decreasing the per-transistor silicon costs with a die shrink, but the main bottlenecks are obviously in the static machinery costs (which you say are tied to die size, which certainly makes sense to me) in addition to the IP laws allowing manufacturers to carefully control the price and also prevent too many fabs from being built (...by competitors.) There are other reasons to want to shrink things, of course.
"Chips are cheap" is the thesis I'm trying to support here. The static costs are huge, but the per-unit costs are minimal. Phrases like 'driving down the cost of making transistors' thus sit wrong with me, even though they're accurate. It's an incomplete picture that's being painted.
Except prices obviously won't stay that high for long. Equilibrium will most likely be at a price point that still guarantees a shortage.
That statement makes no sense.
I phrase that badly and it's dependent on a number of assumptions about the assumed social and emotional "costs" borne by the family members. But let's put that aside and focus on your $100,000 claim here:
Please draw me a supply&demand graph illustrating how everyone gets their organ in a timely manner AND people still get $100,000 per dead family member, keeping in mind that there are millions of poor people who would be very happy with a mere $1000 and also plenty of poor people who need a heart and can't afford $100k. I'm assuming you're arguing for a REAL free market here, with no price discrimination and thus one spot price (or a bid/ask, perhaps.) If you mean something else, say so.
Now, just go look at the figures of the number of poor people that die every month in the country vs. the number of people who have been added on organ waiting lists during that month (NOT the total number of people currently on the list; that isn't a relevant comparison). Yes yes, there are some caveats here re: tissue type matching, but they're getting better and better at working around that. So with your system, either you:
1....can coax enough people into the system to make the price for most organs quickly crash, turning the system into an effective charity, possibly with some nominal for-your-trouble amount. People's propensity for charity has almost nothing to do with the magical free market or any of your other arguments, except to the extent that *any* change in the way things are done would get people talking about it and thinking about it (and this could lead to a cultural change.)
2....can coax a smaller number of people (not enough to meet the demand), so small in fact that the price can be bid up to $100,000ish, blocking out the poor. This would be a failure of your system, not a success.
The situation is a bit different with kidneys and livers, since there is a real cost in inconvenience and health risks. The free market will have a stronger positive impact here, and the price won't drop quite as low unless enough cadaver organs become available (in which case live donations will pretty much cease.)
I'm broadly in favor of the free market (with reservations about cadaver donations due to perverse incentives), but in practical terms this is mainly just a means to increase supply and raise awareness. The idea is to get us to a tipping point outlined in #1, not to settle into some hellhole status quo you alluded to where only the rich can afford hearts.
There is every reason to; it's not a fair or transparent system.
Well make it fair and transparent then. This isn't the IRS or EPA or DEA we're talking about here. It's fucking optional, it's not something that requires money beyond a little administrative overhead and it leverages the fact that you can ask people and make them think about it in common governmental settings like the DMV. The point is to get enough organs available (from private donors and from the public system) that the waiting time for everything drops to a matter of days or weeks. I'm in favor of anything that does that without containing significant downsides.
Ah, the usual progressive approach: simply deny reality and facts and double down on stupid policies.
That statement makes no sense.
It's not progressivism to argue for the continued existence of a centralized institution, particularly one that isn't sucking up a significant amount of money and has voluntary participation. If that's progressivism, then anything other than rabid anarcho-libertarianism must be "progressive".
I want public roads to remain public, too. Guess that makes me a bleeding heart, eh? But this isn't even 1/10,000th as intrusive as public roads are... the costs are minimal, and there's no trampling on people's rights through eminent domain.
Just because I usually favor a reduction of government interference in the marketplace doesn't mean I've overdosed on libertarian flavored acid.
And if there is no specific provision in the last will, the heirs have a $100000+ incentive to opt in.
Except prices obviously won't stay that high for long. Equilibrium will most likely be at a price point that still guarantees a shortage. There's no reason to dismantle a nationalized (dare I say socialized) waiting list system as well. Keep that checkbox there when you get your driver's license, but add a little bit in bold about how if you're not an organ donor, you're at the back of the line. That simple change might obliterate most of the shortages right there.
And then we still have the perverse incentives to think about. This is why I'm pretty solidly in favor of selling kidneys and livers but not entirely convinced about hearts.
First, define "raw materials". Sand is cheap, but producing pure silicon from it is not (and that's one of the things you just buy at a foundry), so there is a significant material cost.
Definite significant. More than, say, 5% of the cost of the retail price (CPUs, GPUs, memory) or more than 20% the cost of the wholesale price?
. The process is very mature, that also does its part via very high yields (very few of the chips produced are defective).
What does that have to do with Moore's law and the shrinking of transistors? If smaller scale plants happen to have better yields as a side effect of being newer, I don't see how that's relevant. I don't think you meant to imply that smaller transistors are inherently more durable?
because it is more expensive
Well I'm definitely up against the limits of my knowledge here, but I would assume that creating the die or proof or whatever the hell it's called would be a significant cost. Regardless, this is fairly tangential.
Operating a manufacturing plant has a huge component of "operating it 1 hour costs this much, no matter what technology you produce".
My point entirely. If the machines are by their nature limited to a certain physical chip size but not a specific scale, then yes you could misleadingly say this is all about reducing the costs of transistors, but in that case I think it would be more useful to say it's making it easier/cheaper to crank them out faster (as a side effect of making them smaller.)
Again, I'm talking about marginal costs here. "Decreasing the cost per transistor" is a fairly strange way of putting it at best. The raw materials needed to create the transistors haven't been significant for a long time now. The point is how many transistors you can make with a given die as well as the properties of those transistors.
Chip cost is based on area, so making stuff smaller reduces the cost per transistor.
... explain that, if you would. Chip cost is not driven by the cost of raw materials, yes?
Point #1: Calculators can be bought at dollar stores and have been sold in dollar stores for at least a decade, if not two. (Pocket calculators used to cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars.) Correct me if I'm wrong, I do not think that these calculators are using the latest sub-90nm technology. I suspect they're using very old fab technology.
Point #2: I don't have a link handy, but there's a chip that recently came into the public domain (in terms of patents) that was in the Sega Genesis or Sega Saturn or something, as well as some other embedded devices. The factory is now providing the chips at something like $0.12 apiece or some other stupid low price, when decades ago they were presumably a significant portion of the cost of the video game console (I apologize for lacking the Google-fu to find the relevant articles right now.) The price has fallen dramatically, but the fab technique is presumably the same.
Only if there are no PSAs or news stories on it. Show a guy who's been waiting for years next to a guy who got one immediately, and then when people see the checkbox when they renew their driver's license, many will change their minds.
the small number of people needing a transplant would become donors
As I said, there would be a waiting period after switching from non-donor to donor before one gets moved onto the short list with the rest of the donors. Ideally this waiting period would vary by transplant type such that the waiting period for non-donors who immediately switch to donor status is just somewhat shorter than (not vastly shorter than) just waiting it out as a non-donor.
many of them unsuitable anyway
You keep saying this. I'm not at all convinced that people who are eligible for organ transplantation are likely to have multiple organ failure and/or be suffering from an incurable disease that has contaminated all major organs. I suspect these people are, under the current scheme, at the bottom of the list or completely ineligible for organ transplantation due to the low likelihood of it making a significant difference.
If someone needs a new kidney and they're also in congestive heart failure and have liver disease... guess what, they're not getting any of that. If someone just needs one of those things, and switches over to donor status to get a slight speed benefit, if they die before they get their organ then those other organs become available. There could be some corner cases here with people who are very healthy but HIV positive... meh.
What's "making the world a worse place" is that some special interests managed to push through legislation decades ago that allowed hospitals to take people's private property (i.e. their organs) without compensation
The dead don't have rights. The grieving family does to an extent, but if the living don't want to bother making their wishes clear while they are still living (no one here is arguing that opt-out should be impossible), I see no need to literally let people die to try to try to rectify the presumed sloth of the dead.
Create a free market in them
I'm for this as well. I'm for all of these things: default opt-in / explicit opt-out, opt-ins getting preference over opt-outs, and legalization of organ sale (particularly kidneys, livers, and other organs that can be removed from a live donor) with safeguards in place to minimize the chance of nastiness.
Others will complain that some people who are on the list are destroying their organs with alcohol and lifestyle choices.
Ah wait, were you alluding to, for example, a 70 year old opt-in organ donor who is an alcoholic and has already been through three livers being prioritized over a 20 year old non-drinker opt-out? Well, I think the answer for that is the prioritization of opt-ins doesn't have to be the only or overriding rule. Very high risk recipients, particularly those whose conditions were caused through their own recklessness, can and should be moved down or off of the list regardless of their opt-in status.
It will never fly, because some people will claim religious discrimination as their beliefs force them to opt out.
It's pretty doubtful a religious discrimination case would win out in a first amendment battle, given the red letter law there, nor is the case one that's sympathetic enough to garner much support from lawmakers or the public ("So you're saying it's ok for us to defile our bodies to save your life, but not the other way around?")
Others will complain that some people who are on the list are destroying their organs with alcohol and lifestyle choices.
It's not the economics of each individual transaction that matters; it's the big picture. People will most likely make the decision early in their lives and then forget about it. There aren't any realistic perverse incentives there that I can see.
I see the issue of a default opt-in / explicit opt-out being a bigger problem in America than opt-ins getting preferential treatment, because you will inevitably get a grieving family member who goes apeshit over religious objections or not being able to see the body before it's cut up or something, and that will carry powerful emotional weight even though the arguments in favor of this scheme are very compelling.
This gets very, very tricky. I don't think presumed consent in this particular area bothers me per se, but I can imagine a lot of other issues where presumed consent would scare the living daylights out of me. Sounds like a very slippery slope.
I don't know...limiting implied consent to dead people feels like a pretty good firewall to me. Where do you imagine we could end up sliding to? (Talking about implied consent only, not other issues like doctors possibly being less than enthusiastic to save someone.)
That's a useless suggestion: people who need organ donations are generally not suitable to donate...
Err, if you have a bad heart, why must it follow that you have bad kidneys, corneas, skin, liver, etc?
...and they know it long ahead of time.
Even if true (do most of them know prior to the age of 18?), this seems irrelevant. The idea that you are pushed below organ donors on the recipient list if you've opted out of organ donation in the past X months (to prevent people from simply switching the moment they learn they need a transplant) is entirely sensible and entirely fair. Whether or not your condition is detectable far in advance and how long you've been on the waiting list is really beside the point.
Well, one reason is a concern that doctors and hospitals might be less interested in saving you if that means potentially damaging donatable organs. There are many other reasons as well.
But that's the only reasonable reason, and it's questionable how big of a concern it will be in an opt-out situation wherein the large majority of the population are organ donors. It's also questionable how big of a concern it is in any country with strong anti-malpractice liability law.
All other reasons are just sentimental and religious. People should still have a right to opt out for those reasons, but that doesn't mean exercising that right comes without consequences.
ready to attribute base motives to everybody at the drop of a pin.
Motivation is irrelevant. Regardless of the reasonableness of opting out of organ donation, it does not make it any less reasonable to insist that those who opt-in (or in the case of France, do not opt out) receive preferential treatment, except in the cases of minors whose parents have opted them out.
Arguing otherwise is akin to arguing that fire insurance companies should pay when anyone's house burns down, without regard to whether or not they've actually paid their premiums. You're arguing for something that will make the world a worse place.
Intel says transistors produced in this way will be cheaper than those that came before, continuing the decades-long trend at the heart of Moore's Law -- and contradicting widespread talk that transistor-production costs have already sunk as low as they will go.
Err, what now? I thought smaller transistors were desirable for performance reasons. Has the marginal per-transistor cost been what's holding us back all these years?
I was under the impression that the costs for microprocessor fabrication had to do with their design and then building the foundry. The per-unit cost (and thus per-transistor cost) is utterly negligible, right?
This is a salient point because it implies that in decades to come we're eventually going to see a steep drop-off in prices for not just CPUs, but also RAM and flash memory once enough patents expire and enough high-output fabs come online, which promises to be a utterly world changing solution-in-search-of-a-problem. (Specifically, I predict this will be the point at which AI really takes off.)
If you're going to truncating a quote to make a point about my supposed ignorance, you should try not to choose a line that is about how shitty your communication and/or comprehension skills are, Mr. I-don't-know-what-a-strawman-is.
Were you thinking your response contradicted, rather than amplified, the statement you were responding to?
Yes. Let me remind you what that argument was:
Now both parties are dependent upon war for a successful economy.
It's a moronic one for multiple reasons, but as an obvious point there's never been a strong effort (to my knowledge) to downsize the military even in times of peace, and spending during peacetime thus remains as strong as ever, so even if one were to concede the fairly outlandish claim that military spending were vital to the success of our economy, it by no means follows that war is.
Now let's see how long it takes for some AC to babble some bullshit about the petrodollar.
I have no idea what your beef is. My point is thus: we can easily sink a trillion bucks on the F-35, 66 billion on the F-22, untold billions on bases in Europe and next gen research projects and the latest reactive armor technology and whatnot... the actual act of paying people extra money to take that equipment into combat is not necessary to spend a bunch of money on the military, nor did our economy do much better after we became involved in Iraq.
Now both parties are dependent upon war for a successful economy.
This is bullshit. That's my point. Argue about the lobbyists and warhawks all you want, but war is not and has not been propping up our economy.
When's the last time the US was at peace for longer than a presidential term (4 years)?
The claim was about economics, not how long we've gone without military action. My response is that we spend on our military like mad even in peacetime, so this makes little sense.
Prior to September 11, our R&D, logistical investments, and other standing-army costs far outstripped our operational expenses in the minor conflicts we were involved in. The last quarter of the twentieth century did not feature any major wars for us, yet we mysteriously managed to avoid slipping into an economic depression.
That's a strawman.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Not sure where you get your information, but the Kurds split themselves off and were mostly autonomous long before Iraq part 2, and we attempted to unite all three in a federation. We would have probably done better to split them up and sent them to separate corners, as draconian and disruptive as that would've been, but the fact is we did the opposite of what you're saying. We didn't split up anything. They split themselves up. You're tragically misinformed if you think this conflict dates back to only 2003.
I was against Iraq from the start, but mindless self-flagellation (assuming you're American) doesn't accomplish much except disqualifying yourself from the conversation at the grown-up table, and when large sections of the left do this it ends up empowering the reactionary warhawk right.
It is not spinelessness to live and breathe in the real world, where everyone has blood on their hands and virtually every single decision of any significant magnitude is of a "lesser evil" sort.
* Increased Chinese and Russian dominance in the world is not preferable, and you'll find their direct oppression and foreign alliances are more cynical and destructive than anything we've recently done.
* The continued propagation of Salafism and pan-Islamism in the Muslim world is not preferable to the status quo, including every single wrong and stupid thing we've done on this front.
* The EU is nowhere near strong enough or stable enough to be a powerful world player without America at its back.
None of that is apologia for America; it is merely the recognition that the improvement and maintenance of America, which is indeed a patriotic enterprise, is still the best hope for the world. Advocating for the downfall of America is advocating for a power vacuum that will be filled by something worse, and in ages past demonstrably was worse.
Now both parties are dependent upon war for a successful economy.
Nonsense. Peacetime military spending has never been an issue for us.
Notice we're still in Afghanistan.
Because the Taliban were stronger than the "moderate" forces in Afghan society, and still are. We can't fix Afghanistan without resorting to draconian cultural imperialism (*real* cultural imperialism, not the SJW buzzword); we can only play for time and hope it somehow fixes itself.
This is largely due to the influence of conservative Islam and Islamism, but there are also some complex intersecting issues with the war on drugs, warlordism and interactions with Pakistan, itself an extremely fucked-up country with fucked-up rulers whom we prop up because we don't want nukes to fall into the hands of people who would actually use them.
As it stands right now, the best thing that could happen for world peace is for the US to go down in flames... the rational choice for the world at large is to get rid of us.
Try connecting these two bits of reasoning you've displayed here. How and to what extent did we "create ISIS"? Well, our policies in Iraq ended up creating a power vacuum, of course.
Now onto your claims about America's downfall being for the best: Do you honestly believe that in the ensuing worldwide power vacuum that things would actually get better?
People around the world might wish us ill, but this wish most definitely does not represent a "rational choice" unless they happen to be in a country or part of a movement that is posed to benefit from our downfall. And if you make a list of those countries and movements most likely to benefit from our downfall, I think you'll quickly understand why every clear-thinking person in the rest of the world is in favor of American soft-power hegemony enduring (along with a grotesquely hypertrophic military held in reserve), despite the long list of legitimate grievances they may have.
There simply isn't a good second option to be found anywhere. Maybe in 50 years the EU could be a viable alternative, if they can get their shit together.
The opinion of physicists and engineers are, so far, against your claims and in support of the assertion that the wall of air will be moving at close to the speed of sound and poses a significant danger to the vehicle.
air can travel around the train thus reducing pressure differential
Not something you can hand wave away, by the way. You're talking about aerodynamic displacement around and behind the vehicle generated from forward momentum. We can't assume this displacement will just automatically happen at a fast enough rate to ensure that the vehicle doesn't fatally decelerate.
It's seeming as though things are a bit more complex than I initially thought, but that doesn't give you any points for your hand-waving dismissals. In particular, anyone who flatly says that the air wouldn't even budge the vehicle is full of shit.
This ignores the fact that it is a *wall* of air with literally miles and miles (i.e. tons and tons) of air behind it. If the air isn't traveling at 600+MPH, it will be relatively incompressible. If it *is* traveling at 600+ MPH and the car traveling at around the same speed, it will be somewhat compressible but I suspect the deceleration forces would still be extreme.
If you're interested in an actual answer here (as opposed to mere smugness or hero worship), I've just taken up the matter at/r/AskPhysics.
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It amounts to spending 3 times as much money in production
"Spending money on production" is not the same thing as "spending money on silicon wafers". If the machine time is limited[1] and/or expensive and the die size is held constant, then obviously shrinking your transistors lets you do more with the same amount of machine time. Summarizing that gain as "we made the transistors cheaper!" misses the point in my view. The focus should be on the cost, output, speed, efficiency, availability (if third party) and IP status of the fab machinery. Shrinking the transistors is one way to make the machinery more efficient and thus cheaper to use for the same output, but there are others.
it amounts to spending 3 times as much money in production 10 years later
I'm not sure that means much given the mid to high end chips I explicitly mentioned that I was referring to in my last post. Depends on what they're lumping into "production costs" though. And it also obviously depends on their gross profit margin (minus all design and initial setup costs), which I'm assuming is fairly fat. I grant you that it might be more important for generic unpatented chips than I originally imagined.
But despite those reservations, I still don't necessarily dispute the conclusion. I dispute the phrasing. If it's true that Intel can save a significant chunk of money for their CPUs by making their machines more efficient, then that's surely because their machines cost a lot of money to build and run per unit of output. The costs and output bottlenecks involved here are complex... "transistors are expensive to make, so making them smaller saves money!" doesn't sound like a useful summary of the situation. I could probably form a more detailed argument here were I more familiar with the exact processes and expenses involved, particularly as they relate to die size.
1. And once again, it's worth noting these limits aren't necessarily permanent or natural ones. It probably greatly depends on IP law, static investment costs for the machinery and technicians in an uncertain market, and various other barriers to entry that may suddenly give way. The expense isn't based on a hard scarcity (like gold), nor is it based on insurmountable issues of size and complexities (like cars.) If things change and a few high output fabs come online and we're dealing with a chip in the public domain... wouldn't you expect the price to plummet dramatically, even if the transistor size were held constant? Note that I'm not saying that's what Intel should do.
Again, I say go both routes. Plenty of people will want to pay the money to skip the line. The prime obstacle here is a cultural impediment standing in the way of the huge supply reaching the moderate demand, and this obstacle should be attacked through both the charity and the capitalistic angles. In some areas these two things might work against each other (like, say, municipal wifi. Or schools and universities) and you would thus have an argument at least in principle, but not in the case of organ donation.
If I had to choose between the aforementioned reforms of the current system and legalizing organ sale, I'd probably choose the latter because it will make bigger waves[1], leading to both reforms and increased awareness. But we don't have to choose. Arguing for the abolition of the public charity option sabotages your own case, makes you sound like your real priority here is blindly promoting libertarian means with the ends (saving lives) as a mere afterthought. I still consider myself a libertarian of sorts, but this political orientation will remain doomed to irrelevance so long as this tedious, predictable zealotry is adhered to.
1. The default opt-in reform, depending on how it's set up, could give you a much bigger boost in the organ supply but in practice I suspect it's going to be hard to enforce over the objections of family members, particularly in America. Still, it would be worth doing as a firm yet resistible push in the right direction. Don't take away rights, but force people to actually expend a little effort if they really, really don't want to their (or their family member's) organs to save anyone's life. This is something most people simply don't think about. Force them to think about it a little bit if they do want to opt out, and I suspect that a lot of current non-donors won't.
Costs are roughly proportional to area
That's what I assumed. "Cost per transistor" is technically accurate, but the primary factors in cost are in the design of the chip, the creation of the die, the cost of the foundry and the time it takes 'em to create the chip (which is a function of die size, sure. Among other things.) As I've speculated elsewhere, if a government were to drop hundreds of billions of dollars on large, high-output fabs (while either not caring about patents or buying out the patent holders or waiting until they expire or whatever) and leave them cranking out chips at full speed, the costs per chip would surely be ridiculously low. The price isn't being driven by transistors costing too damn much to make. It's being driven by the limited quantity of machinery (and die space) and also the actions of the suppliers themselves, who are paying attention to the estimated supply/demand curves so they can avoid overproducing. (I'm talking about the chips in mid to high end electronics, by the way, not the $1 calculator.)
As far as the wafers go, I'm seeing stuff like $1-$3 per square inch. There's no way Intel is going through the effort of their "tick" phase just to save thirty cents of silicon for their $100+ processor. And I suspect the production of high purity wafers is something that probably also would scale up decently if there were motivation to do so.
So sure, you're decreasing the per-transistor silicon costs with a die shrink, but the main bottlenecks are obviously in the static machinery costs (which you say are tied to die size, which certainly makes sense to me) in addition to the IP laws allowing manufacturers to carefully control the price and also prevent too many fabs from being built (...by competitors.) There are other reasons to want to shrink things, of course.
"Chips are cheap" is the thesis I'm trying to support here. The static costs are huge, but the per-unit costs are minimal. Phrases like 'driving down the cost of making transistors' thus sit wrong with me, even though they're accurate. It's an incomplete picture that's being painted.
That statement makes no sense.
I phrase that badly and it's dependent on a number of assumptions about the assumed social and emotional "costs" borne by the family members. But let's put that aside and focus on your $100,000 claim here:
...can coax enough people into the system to make the price for most organs quickly crash, turning the system into an effective charity, possibly with some nominal for-your-trouble amount. People's propensity for charity has almost nothing to do with the magical free market or any of your other arguments, except to the extent that *any* change in the way things are done would get people talking about it and thinking about it (and this could lead to a cultural change.)
...can coax a smaller number of people (not enough to meet the demand), so small in fact that the price can be bid up to $100,000ish, blocking out the poor. This would be a failure of your system, not a success.
Please draw me a supply&demand graph illustrating how everyone gets their organ in a timely manner AND people still get $100,000 per dead family member, keeping in mind that there are millions of poor people who would be very happy with a mere $1000 and also plenty of poor people who need a heart and can't afford $100k. I'm assuming you're arguing for a REAL free market here, with no price discrimination and thus one spot price (or a bid/ask, perhaps.) If you mean something else, say so.
Now, just go look at the figures of the number of poor people that die every month in the country vs. the number of people who have been added on organ waiting lists during that month (NOT the total number of people currently on the list; that isn't a relevant comparison). Yes yes, there are some caveats here re: tissue type matching, but they're getting better and better at working around that. So with your system, either you:
1.
2.
The situation is a bit different with kidneys and livers, since there is a real cost in inconvenience and health risks. The free market will have a stronger positive impact here, and the price won't drop quite as low unless enough cadaver organs become available (in which case live donations will pretty much cease.)
I'm broadly in favor of the free market (with reservations about cadaver donations due to perverse incentives), but in practical terms this is mainly just a means to increase supply and raise awareness. The idea is to get us to a tipping point outlined in #1, not to settle into some hellhole status quo you alluded to where only the rich can afford hearts.
There is every reason to; it's not a fair or transparent system.
Well make it fair and transparent then. This isn't the IRS or EPA or DEA we're talking about here. It's fucking optional, it's not something that requires money beyond a little administrative overhead and it leverages the fact that you can ask people and make them think about it in common governmental settings like the DMV. The point is to get enough organs available (from private donors and from the public system) that the waiting time for everything drops to a matter of days or weeks. I'm in favor of anything that does that without containing significant downsides.
Ah, the usual progressive approach: simply deny reality and facts and double down on stupid policies.
That statement makes no sense.
It's not progressivism to argue for the continued existence of a centralized institution, particularly one that isn't sucking up a significant amount of money and has voluntary participation. If that's progressivism, then anything other than rabid anarcho-libertarianism must be "progressive".
I want public roads to remain public, too. Guess that makes me a bleeding heart, eh? But this isn't even 1/10,000th as intrusive as public roads are... the costs are minimal, and there's no trampling on people's rights through eminent domain.
And if there is no specific provision in the last will, the heirs have a $100000+ incentive to opt in.
Except prices obviously won't stay that high for long. Equilibrium will most likely be at a price point that still guarantees a shortage. There's no reason to dismantle a nationalized (dare I say socialized) waiting list system as well. Keep that checkbox there when you get your driver's license, but add a little bit in bold about how if you're not an organ donor, you're at the back of the line. That simple change might obliterate most of the shortages right there.
And then we still have the perverse incentives to think about. This is why I'm pretty solidly in favor of selling kidneys and livers but not entirely convinced about hearts.
First, define "raw materials". Sand is cheap, but producing pure silicon from it is not (and that's one of the things you just buy at a foundry), so there is a significant material cost.
Definite significant. More than, say, 5% of the cost of the retail price (CPUs, GPUs, memory) or more than 20% the cost of the wholesale price?
. The process is very mature, that also does its part via very high yields (very few of the chips produced are defective).
What does that have to do with Moore's law and the shrinking of transistors? If smaller scale plants happen to have better yields as a side effect of being newer, I don't see how that's relevant. I don't think you meant to imply that smaller transistors are inherently more durable?
because it is more expensive
Well I'm definitely up against the limits of my knowledge here, but I would assume that creating the die or proof or whatever the hell it's called would be a significant cost. Regardless, this is fairly tangential.
Operating a manufacturing plant has a huge component of "operating it 1 hour costs this much, no matter what technology you produce".
My point entirely. If the machines are by their nature limited to a certain physical chip size but not a specific scale, then yes you could misleadingly say this is all about reducing the costs of transistors, but in that case I think it would be more useful to say it's making it easier/cheaper to crank them out faster (as a side effect of making them smaller.)
Again, I'm talking about marginal costs here. "Decreasing the cost per transistor" is a fairly strange way of putting it at best. The raw materials needed to create the transistors haven't been significant for a long time now. The point is how many transistors you can make with a given die as well as the properties of those transistors.
Moors law is about cost
No it isn't. It's about transistor count.
Chip cost is based on area, so making stuff smaller reduces the cost per transistor.
... explain that, if you would. Chip cost is not driven by the cost of raw materials, yes?
Point #1: Calculators can be bought at dollar stores and have been sold in dollar stores for at least a decade, if not two. (Pocket calculators used to cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars.) Correct me if I'm wrong, I do not think that these calculators are using the latest sub-90nm technology. I suspect they're using very old fab technology.
Point #2: I don't have a link handy, but there's a chip that recently came into the public domain (in terms of patents) that was in the Sega Genesis or Sega Saturn or something, as well as some other embedded devices. The factory is now providing the chips at something like $0.12 apiece or some other stupid low price, when decades ago they were presumably a significant portion of the cost of the video game console (I apologize for lacking the Google-fu to find the relevant articles right now.) The price has fallen dramatically, but the fab technique is presumably the same.
and nobody else would care one way or another.
Only if there are no PSAs or news stories on it. Show a guy who's been waiting for years next to a guy who got one immediately, and then when people see the checkbox when they renew their driver's license, many will change their minds.
the small number of people needing a transplant would become donors
As I said, there would be a waiting period after switching from non-donor to donor before one gets moved onto the short list with the rest of the donors. Ideally this waiting period would vary by transplant type such that the waiting period for non-donors who immediately switch to donor status is just somewhat shorter than (not vastly shorter than) just waiting it out as a non-donor.
many of them unsuitable anyway
You keep saying this. I'm not at all convinced that people who are eligible for organ transplantation are likely to have multiple organ failure and/or be suffering from an incurable disease that has contaminated all major organs. I suspect these people are, under the current scheme, at the bottom of the list or completely ineligible for organ transplantation due to the low likelihood of it making a significant difference.
If someone needs a new kidney and they're also in congestive heart failure and have liver disease... guess what, they're not getting any of that. If someone just needs one of those things, and switches over to donor status to get a slight speed benefit, if they die before they get their organ then those other organs become available. There could be some corner cases here with people who are very healthy but HIV positive... meh.
What's "making the world a worse place" is that some special interests managed to push through legislation decades ago that allowed hospitals to take people's private property (i.e. their organs) without compensation
The dead don't have rights. The grieving family does to an extent, but if the living don't want to bother making their wishes clear while they are still living (no one here is arguing that opt-out should be impossible), I see no need to literally let people die to try to try to rectify the presumed sloth of the dead.
Create a free market in them
I'm for this as well. I'm for all of these things: default opt-in / explicit opt-out, opt-ins getting preference over opt-outs, and legalization of organ sale (particularly kidneys, livers, and other organs that can be removed from a live donor) with safeguards in place to minimize the chance of nastiness.
Others will complain that some people who are on the list are destroying their organs with alcohol and lifestyle choices.
Ah wait, were you alluding to, for example, a 70 year old opt-in organ donor who is an alcoholic and has already been through three livers being prioritized over a 20 year old non-drinker opt-out? Well, I think the answer for that is the prioritization of opt-ins doesn't have to be the only or overriding rule. Very high risk recipients, particularly those whose conditions were caused through their own recklessness, can and should be moved down or off of the list regardless of their opt-in status.
It will never fly, because some people will claim religious discrimination as their beliefs force them to opt out.
It's pretty doubtful a religious discrimination case would win out in a first amendment battle, given the red letter law there, nor is the case one that's sympathetic enough to garner much support from lawmakers or the public ("So you're saying it's ok for us to defile our bodies to save your life, but not the other way around?")
Others will complain that some people who are on the list are destroying their organs with alcohol and lifestyle choices.
It's not the economics of each individual transaction that matters; it's the big picture. People will most likely make the decision early in their lives and then forget about it. There aren't any realistic perverse incentives there that I can see.
I see the issue of a default opt-in / explicit opt-out being a bigger problem in America than opt-ins getting preferential treatment, because you will inevitably get a grieving family member who goes apeshit over religious objections or not being able to see the body before it's cut up or something, and that will carry powerful emotional weight even though the arguments in favor of this scheme are very compelling.
This gets very, very tricky. I don't think presumed consent in this particular area bothers me per se, but I can imagine a lot of other issues where presumed consent would scare the living daylights out of me. Sounds like a very slippery slope.
I don't know...limiting implied consent to dead people feels like a pretty good firewall to me. Where do you imagine we could end up sliding to? (Talking about implied consent only, not other issues like doctors possibly being less than enthusiastic to save someone.)
That's a useless suggestion: people who need organ donations are generally not suitable to donate...
Err, if you have a bad heart, why must it follow that you have bad kidneys, corneas, skin, liver, etc?
...and they know it long ahead of time.
Even if true (do most of them know prior to the age of 18?), this seems irrelevant. The idea that you are pushed below organ donors on the recipient list if you've opted out of organ donation in the past X months (to prevent people from simply switching the moment they learn they need a transplant) is entirely sensible and entirely fair. Whether or not your condition is detectable far in advance and how long you've been on the waiting list is really beside the point.
Well, one reason is a concern that doctors and hospitals might be less interested in saving you if that means potentially damaging donatable organs. There are many other reasons as well.
But that's the only reasonable reason, and it's questionable how big of a concern it will be in an opt-out situation wherein the large majority of the population are organ donors. It's also questionable how big of a concern it is in any country with strong anti-malpractice liability law.
All other reasons are just sentimental and religious. People should still have a right to opt out for those reasons, but that doesn't mean exercising that right comes without consequences.
ready to attribute base motives to everybody at the drop of a pin.
Motivation is irrelevant. Regardless of the reasonableness of opting out of organ donation, it does not make it any less reasonable to insist that those who opt-in (or in the case of France, do not opt out) receive preferential treatment, except in the cases of minors whose parents have opted them out.
Arguing otherwise is akin to arguing that fire insurance companies should pay when anyone's house burns down, without regard to whether or not they've actually paid their premiums. You're arguing for something that will make the world a worse place.
Intel says transistors produced in this way will be cheaper than those that came before, continuing the decades-long trend at the heart of Moore's Law -- and contradicting widespread talk that transistor-production costs have already sunk as low as they will go.
Err, what now? I thought smaller transistors were desirable for performance reasons. Has the marginal per-transistor cost been what's holding us back all these years?
I was under the impression that the costs for microprocessor fabrication had to do with their design and then building the foundry. The per-unit cost (and thus per-transistor cost) is utterly negligible, right?
This is a salient point because it implies that in decades to come we're eventually going to see a steep drop-off in prices for not just CPUs, but also RAM and flash memory once enough patents expire and enough high-output fabs come online, which promises to be a utterly world changing solution-in-search-of-a-problem. (Specifically, I predict this will be the point at which AI really takes off.)
If you're going to truncating a quote to make a point about my supposed ignorance, you should try not to choose a line that is about how shitty your communication and/or comprehension skills are, Mr. I-don't-know-what-a-strawman-is.
Were you thinking your response contradicted, rather than amplified, the statement you were responding to?
Yes. Let me remind you what that argument was:
Now both parties are dependent upon war for a successful economy.
It's a moronic one for multiple reasons, but as an obvious point there's never been a strong effort (to my knowledge) to downsize the military even in times of peace, and spending during peacetime thus remains as strong as ever, so even if one were to concede the fairly outlandish claim that military spending were vital to the success of our economy, it by no means follows that war is.
Now let's see how long it takes for some AC to babble some bullshit about the petrodollar.
Now both parties are dependent upon war for a successful economy.
This is bullshit. That's my point. Argue about the lobbyists and warhawks all you want, but war is not and has not been propping up our economy.
When's the last time the US was at peace for longer than a presidential term (4 years)?
The claim was about economics, not how long we've gone without military action. My response is that we spend on our military like mad even in peacetime, so this makes little sense.
Prior to September 11, our R&D, logistical investments, and other standing-army costs far outstripped our operational expenses in the minor conflicts we were involved in. The last quarter of the twentieth century did not feature any major wars for us, yet we mysteriously managed to avoid slipping into an economic depression.
That's a strawman.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Not sure where you get your information, but the Kurds split themselves off and were mostly autonomous long before Iraq part 2, and we attempted to unite all three in a federation. We would have probably done better to split them up and sent them to separate corners, as draconian and disruptive as that would've been, but the fact is we did the opposite of what you're saying. We didn't split up anything. They split themselves up. You're tragically misinformed if you think this conflict dates back to only 2003.
I was against Iraq from the start, but mindless self-flagellation (assuming you're American) doesn't accomplish much except disqualifying yourself from the conversation at the grown-up table, and when large sections of the left do this it ends up empowering the reactionary warhawk right.
It is not spinelessness to live and breathe in the real world, where everyone has blood on their hands and virtually every single decision of any significant magnitude is of a "lesser evil" sort.
* Increased Chinese and Russian dominance in the world is not preferable, and you'll find their direct oppression and foreign alliances are more cynical and destructive than anything we've recently done.
* The continued propagation of Salafism and pan-Islamism in the Muslim world is not preferable to the status quo, including every single wrong and stupid thing we've done on this front.
* The EU is nowhere near strong enough or stable enough to be a powerful world player without America at its back.
None of that is apologia for America; it is merely the recognition that the improvement and maintenance of America, which is indeed a patriotic enterprise, is still the best hope for the world. Advocating for the downfall of America is advocating for a power vacuum that will be filled by something worse, and in ages past demonstrably was worse.
Now both parties are dependent upon war for a successful economy.
Nonsense. Peacetime military spending has never been an issue for us.
Notice we're still in Afghanistan.
Because the Taliban were stronger than the "moderate" forces in Afghan society, and still are. We can't fix Afghanistan without resorting to draconian cultural imperialism (*real* cultural imperialism, not the SJW buzzword); we can only play for time and hope it somehow fixes itself.
This is largely due to the influence of conservative Islam and Islamism, but there are also some complex intersecting issues with the war on drugs, warlordism and interactions with Pakistan, itself an extremely fucked-up country with fucked-up rulers whom we prop up because we don't want nukes to fall into the hands of people who would actually use them.
We overthrew Iraq [sic], creating ISIS
As it stands right now, the best thing that could happen for world peace is for the US to go down in flames... the rational choice for the world at large is to get rid of us.
Try connecting these two bits of reasoning you've displayed here. How and to what extent did we "create ISIS"? Well, our policies in Iraq ended up creating a power vacuum, of course.
Now onto your claims about America's downfall being for the best: Do you honestly believe that in the ensuing worldwide power vacuum that things would actually get better?
People around the world might wish us ill, but this wish most definitely does not represent a "rational choice" unless they happen to be in a country or part of a movement that is posed to benefit from our downfall. And if you make a list of those countries and movements most likely to benefit from our downfall, I think you'll quickly understand why every clear-thinking person in the rest of the world is in favor of American soft-power hegemony enduring (along with a grotesquely hypertrophic military held in reserve), despite the long list of legitimate grievances they may have.
There simply isn't a good second option to be found anywhere. Maybe in 50 years the EU could be a viable alternative, if they can get their shit together.
The opinion of physicists and engineers are, so far, against your claims and in support of the assertion that the wall of air will be moving at close to the speed of sound and poses a significant danger to the vehicle.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPh... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEn...
air can travel around the train thus reducing pressure differential
Not something you can hand wave away, by the way. You're talking about aerodynamic displacement around and behind the vehicle generated from forward momentum. We can't assume this displacement will just automatically happen at a fast enough rate to ensure that the vehicle doesn't fatally decelerate.
It's seeming as though things are a bit more complex than I initially thought, but that doesn't give you any points for your hand-waving dismissals. In particular, anyone who flatly says that the air wouldn't even budge the vehicle is full of shit.
This ignores the fact that it is a *wall* of air with literally miles and miles (i.e. tons and tons) of air behind it. If the air isn't traveling at 600+MPH, it will be relatively incompressible. If it *is* traveling at 600+ MPH and the car traveling at around the same speed, it will be somewhat compressible but I suspect the deceleration forces would still be extreme.
/r/AskPhysics.
If you're interested in an actual answer here (as opposed to mere smugness or hero worship), I've just taken up the matter at