Or an established player in the market that wants to keep competitors out (but I guess in a way that is someone who dislikes change). While legislation like this can sometimes be great (e.g. the recent changes forcing longer support for mobile phones) there comes a point where it cuts the other way and it becomes an entry barrier.

Imo the better solution would be to legislate what happens after support ends. Like forcing the disclosure of at least some documentation that allows others to continue servicing the product or at least transfer out data and install other software on the device.

Thanks.

It sounds like the entire industry is fragile at this point.

Things are definitely shifting and it’s not clear how they will play out. And considering leading edge semiconductor manufacturing is one of the most complex processes invented by humanity, while being crucial to our economy, calling it fragile might be accurate.

I’m not sure why Intel can’t just keep making shitty laptop processors though.

Interestingly enough laptop processors might be the one area where Intel is still decently competitive. Their Luna Lake processors (Core Ultra 200V series) are quite competitive and some of the best offerings on the market. Solid performance, good efficiency and strong battery life, and great integrated graphics. However they are using TSMC to manufacture them rather than their own fabs and similar to apples M series chips they utilize integrated memory, which does reduce margins and laptop manufacturers don’t like it as it reduces their ability to differentiate their models.

Intel in it’s current form can’t, because as explained above it is so much more than just the designer of laptop processors. Split up into parts a small fabless design firm for x86 client processors would probably survive, but that wouldn’t be Intel anymore, adress a much smaller market, and also not completely “make”, but only design them.

the client market for desktops and laptops is just way to small to sustain leading edge semiconductor manufacturing on its own. On that note one of the recent comments of Intels current CEO Lip-Bu Tan was that they will only pursue 14A (the process node after the upcoming 18A), if they can at least win one major external client as customer, since otherwise it wouldn’t be economical to scale up. Which basically puts them on a timer of like a year considering the leadup times required.

You only need to be so fast to use the Internet and write papers.

If that were the benchmark we’d have passed it a long time ago. Although it should be noted that progress not only means better performance, but also better efficiency.

I think a partial explanation can be that for most international tourists a visit to the USA is a major trip that gets planned well in advance. Easily half or even a full year ahead. Things only really got bad in the last few months, so we might still see many holidays that were planned before the madness fully set in. If that is the case I’d expect a continued decline in the future, where people choose another destination when deciding their next itinerary.

What is going on here?

I’m just an interested layman, but i’ll give explaining it a try. I think this is more about whether or not Intel can stay in the market for leading edge manufacturing against TSMC.

The first thing to understand is that there are two parts to Intel: the manufacturing side and chip design.

In manufacturing leading edge chips they are primarily competing with TSMC (the clear market leader) and Samsung. In the past they used to be far ahead of the competition, but they screwed up that lead and are now behind. This is a very capital intensive market as fabs cost billions to build. And each new generation gets more and more expensive.

On the design side there are multiple different markets: servers, desktop/laptops, and mobile devices. Ever since losing out on producing the chip for the first iphone intel hasn’t been a factor in the mobile market. Between servers and desktop/laptops, servers are the fastly more important and bigger market. Here they are competing with AMD, but also increasingly arm based processors, increasingly done by the large hyper scalers themselves (e.g. Amazon with their Graviton processors). Additionally with the ai boom the market has severely shifted towards gpus being vastly more important (which is dominated by nvidia).

Intel is relatively unique in that they still do both design and produce their own chips (not taking outside customers, but in recent times outsourcing some manufacturing to tsmc). Samsung also designs and produces their own arm based processors (exynos), but on a smaller scale and also has other customers. AMD used to have fabs in the past, but got rid of them (today called global foundries).

I would argue that here we need to primarily focus on the manufacturing, not design side. Even though they are also under pressure on the design side aswell and e.g. AMD is beating them in the server market.

It’s more about whether or not Intel can hold on being in the leading edge race as manufacturer or drop out (like GlobalFoundries did a while back), which would leave us with only TSMC and Samsung (potentially China’s SMIC, should they ever manage to develop their own EUV technology and catch up). No western manufacturer of leading edge chips, only asian ones that are heavily concentrated geographically and TSMC bearing a substantial geopolitical risk.

As mentioned above Intel has struggled with getting better process nodes working properly (especially in a timely manner) and costs are increasing by a lot. The issue is that now intel is severly cash strapped, as they’ve paid out massive dividends in the past when things were better and now that they’ve fallen behind earnings have disappeared (which is also why the mass layoffs).

Their competitor TSMC can spread the needed investment costs over many large customers such as apple, nvidia, amd and qualcomm. So far Intel manufactured purely for themselves and didn’t take on external customers. With massively increasing costs it becomes obvious how this becomes less feasible on your own and scale increasingly becomes important. Especially if either/both the design or manufacturing side mess up and fall behind on delivering competitive products.

Switching to manufacturing for external customers is difficult. They have to adjust their internal processes to suit what customers are used to from others. There is a potential conflict of interest as Intel might at the same time be the customers rival (an issue TSMC as pure manufacturer doesn’t have). And lastly customers need reliable schedules, if you are e.g. apple and release an iphone anually you need your manufactuerer to reliably deliver a workable node at a specific time and can’t have it delayed (or even have the uncertainty of this happening).

They originally planned for their upcoming 18A (maybe even the axed 20A?) process to have external customers, but that didn’t pan out (they will just produce some of their own products). Now they target external customers for the next generation 14A. Should they by then not have gotten their shit together enough to attract customers or be profitable Intel (the former giant of the semiconductor industry) will probably break apart and be done. At least in it’s current form.

The fabs in germany and poland have been dead in the water for a while now from the moment they fell behind schedule and eventually were put on hold. This is just them officially axing those plans.

That is just a very stupid idea. The best thing for all of us everywhere is for the most rational and well-informed people to vote. The fact that everyone gets a vote is unfortunate for all of us because that includes voters who vote against the public interest, but it is necessary for a free democracy.

Seems like you are arguing for meritocracy here, which has it’s own set of problems.

Even if you want to make the argument that some are informed enough, they are far, FAR fewer than in the adult populace. You do not want to broaden that window.

Honestly, this sounds exactly like an argument that could have been made in a debate about whether or not black people or woman should be allowed to vote.

I think you said it yourself, democray needs to endure that sometimes people just don’t vote in the same way or for the same reasons as it suits ones own views.

I’m reading your post and it reads just the same as what applies to many adults.

I know that I would have voted for a liar with a corrupt past, because of facebook ads of their party I assume. “oh look, they are apologizing and they regret it! they look so honest!”

I can’t even get started how many politicians have a corrupt past here in Germany and got plenty of votes.

nowadays? they just post a tiktok video that they’ll give money to all below 20 if they are elected

Here in Germany parties actively ran on the promise of raising and fixing the pension levels in an already unsustainable system. Alongside other gifts to certain voter bases. The one left out (I assume partially because they are not able to vote): The youth.

I also think you vastly overestimate the amount of influence underage voters would yield. Especially in our demographic structures and based on the fact that a significantly lower share of them would actually make use of it. They certainly wouldn’t have the power to introduce sweeping changes against the better judgement of other voting blocks. But you are right that they might influence smaller changes.

To take one of your examples i could see that for something like the smartphone ban. But would that be so bad? It might be a good thing, but i don’t think this is conclusively proven. In return it is probably something being pushed by a large majority that might not even use a smartphone on a daily basis or at the least is very far removed from the current level of technology. And it also wouldn’t all need to be negative. Take for example the stop killing games petition that is quite popular on this site. That one might suddenly gain some more supporters, which are actually affected by it.

However i’d also see a need for more studies. And i probably wouldn’t just make a major shift like that instantaneously, but rather in a gradual way and maybe lead with changes to smaller more local elections first. Which might give opportunities for such studies.

you can’t ignore the fact that even more propaganda would directly target them, taking advantage of very effective data mining based profiling. they should be able to experience more of life before advertisers starts to dictate their agenda, otherwise they’ll easily think that advertisers are speaking the truth.

Yes, this is indeed an argument that shouldn’t just be ignored. And honestly this should simply never be the case, regardless of age.

I’d break it up into two parts. Official election material and just general advertisements/media. The first one typically is already quite regulated and arguably for the benefit of all should already follow standards that are not harmful to children. The second one seems like the problematic one. However I’d argue that even children are already to some degree getting confronted with what’s going on in the world. Anecdotally i can say that even at elementary school age children seem to be (to varying degrees) at least rudimentally aware of many things. To give a recent example like when Israel bombed Iran.

We have things like cigarettes and alcohol where we impose age limits, but those are directly harmful things. Hard to argue that voting in a democracy is harmful. Sometimes there might be anti democratic parties (like the afd here in germany for example), but in those cases you’d think about banning those, not taking away the ability to vote. Maybe you or someone else could give me an example of something positive being banned based on age because the state/society can’t provide protection from something secondary.

I would also add that advertisement to a young voting base wouldn’t exclusively need to be a bad thing. Take free school lunches for example. If as a politician you run a campaign on that for example you are banking on gaining favor from a voter base that only indirectly is affected by it. The people directly benefiting from it can’t vote for you.

they have a voice. It’s not like people can only vote if they are in their last decade. turning 18, just 2 years, anyone can vote, and I would say even 30 and 40 years olds are largely affected by these issues.

They have a voice, but no vote, which is what matters for the politicians in charge. Also “just 2 years” falls flat since my argument is not about the lowering to 16, but abolishing it in general. So for the sake of argument for example an 8 year old, which would make it a full decade. In practice even longer, since elections aren’t every year and you aren’t guaranteed to have one in the year you turn 18.

And you are right that even 30 and 40 year olds are affected by these issues, but i don’t see how that would be an argument against it. If anything i’d see it as an argument that children should also have a say. We also don’t have an upper limit after which you aren’t allowed to vote anymore. And for obvious reasons it would e.g. be impossible to have a rule that says x years before you die you aren’t allowed to vote anymore, since you won’t suffer all the consequences.

Yes, but we are not filtering for maturity and capability in adults. So if this is the argument then imo it is flawed, since we’d filter for something just to stop filtering for it after a certain age.

If one wants to filter for these things then it should be applied across the board. However we are not doing so for good reasons (I can provide some if needed).

Babies and toddlers don’t know shit, plus parents have an extreme amount of coercion over their children until they’re teenagers.

Like I said we don’t make this a prequisite for adults. There are plenty of disabled or old people fully dependent on others.

Also allowing children to vote will result in more political propaganda targeted at children.

That is an interesting point definitely worth debating. Propaganda would definitely be an issue, but this is the case not just in children, but adults alike. On the other hand with children becoming a voting block it might shift the focus slightly on topics benefiting them.

They deserve to enjoy childhood without worrying about the clusterfuck.

True, although I think children pick up a lot regardless. And importantly obliviousness of issues doesn’t change how it affects them. Climate change and unfair pension systems for example will affect them regardless, this way they’d at least have a voice.

I think “teenager” is probably as low as you want to go for the foreseeable future.

I can for sure see how opinions can differ on the topic and I’d totally be ok with compromises and accepting some degree of hypocrisy. But nonetheless it’s imo worth looking at the issue from the extreme.

As far as compromises go I think another way to go about it would be to have staggered voting with lower limits in more local votes. I could see how it might be more acceptable there for some.

Controversial opinion: I don’t see a justification for ANY voting age.

For adults we (rightfully) don’t make voting dependent on mental or physical capacity, being dependent on other people, and there also is no upper age limit.

So i wouldn’t be opposed to allowing anyone elegible for voting to do so when he/she expresses the wish to do so.

he consumed only vitamins, electrolytes, an unspecified amount of yeast (a source of all essential amino acids) and zero-calorie beverages such as tea, coffee, and sparkling water, although he occasionally added milk and/or sugar to the beverages, especially during the final weeks of the fast.

Worth mentioning imo, but you are right that most people should be fine fasting for some days if necessary. Although I would bet that almost everyone has a few days of food anyways. Unless you literally have empty shelves and buy groceries every day, most people will have a base stock of shelf stable foods like noodles, canned stuff, sugar, flour and so on.

Imo the limiting factor will be drinkable water most of the time. If something would cut off the supply immediately and for longer durations it would be a serious issue. Especially during warmer months.

That reminds me of this Tom Scott video, which shares a somewhat similar idea.

Well part of this is because Europe is in fact heating up faster than the world average

Global mean temperature between 2015 and 2024 was 1.24 to 1.28°C warmer than the pre-industrial level, which makes it the warmest decade on record. European land temperatures have increased even faster over the same period by 2.19 to 2.26°C, depending on the dataset used. European environment agenc

For many a trip to the US from Europe is a major event. I’d imagine that many people planned their trips last year before Trump was even reelected and had already invested a lot of money, at which point sunk fallacy plays a role.

I also think that for many it still hasn’t registered that they are now also at risk and it’s not just the classic family guy meme anymore, where it’s based on skin colour.