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

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

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

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

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

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

Moore's law makes no comments about the cost of each transistor in an advanced process. And believe me, they ain't cheap. It's not a coincidence we're up to PLC flash... why go for 32 levels when TLC is likely already a pain?

You wanna store a few hundred bytes? Print some mechanical knobs and call it a day. You wanna make some real storage devices?

Hire top PhD:
Physicists for quantum effects used (and parasitics mitigated)
Chemical engineers for CVD and other very hard and expensive clean room processes.
Electrical engineers to design analog circuitry for charge pumps and multi-level cell readout technology, as well as digital VLSI/HDL design for digital logic including storage controllers
Mechanical engineers for packaging design and automation for your expensive and dangerous production line
Civil engineers for your fab plant, which is so large that significant infrastructure needs to be built to support your fab (e.g. TSMC in Taiwan funded/built a municipal scale desalination plant of which a significant fraction is used for semiconductor processes)

Until we have replicators as the other commentor pointed out, I'm afraid we aren't even close yet. Fingers crossed we hit type II civ sometime but I won't be holding my breath for it.

Maybe it's a cartel but I don't have my hopes up. Storage technology is only getting more complicated and the number of players is only decreasing.

In my view (and maybe I'm wrong) there's just not that much money to be made in it, contrary to what consumers think. Why fight each other over pennies when you can both earn dollars? Maybe if China figures things out, but you can be my ass I'm not gonna trust a CCP backed storage company lol

Unless this is a matter of price collusion (which I doubt as it appears more as a supply demand issue) I don't think this unregulated capitalism is bad. Last I checked making any kind of products involving semiconductors isn't cheap or easy. Maybe it is once you figure out how to, but the R&D costs involved are insane.

We as consumers want prices as low as possible. Suppliers want prices as high as possible. Samsung (and the like) clearly aren't willing to make more of a product at the price that it is currently at (which is a mistake to begin with). There are plentu of other players making ssds, and the prices are all very similar. Something tells me that they're not gonna price things for cheaper because they can't survive that way.

As an add-on to OP, is it just my confirmation bias or are competitive games a trove for alt-righters? Never seen so many Trump supporters except in CSGO and rocket league...

P(failure second try)=(2/3)^2 since you can eliminate one choice but 2 others are still wrong.

To total:
P(failure)=(3/4)^2*(2/3)^2=1/4
1-1/4=0.75

So the probability of passing is 0.75

Edit:
Remark: this problem is elegant if you attempt to calculate the passing as the complement of failure rather than enumerate all successes. Shouldn't take more than 3 minutes with a clear head if you know the correct approach. If this was an college level intro probability exam question, it should be done the fast way since it's meant to eat up your time otherwise.

P(passing) = 1- P(failure)
P(failure) = P(failure first try)*P(failure second try)
P(failure first try)=(3/4)^2
P(failure second try)=(gonna post in reply)

Well, if you count the corporations as people and give them votes proportional to their income, income does seem to be exceeding inflation. I'm sure in no time trickle-down economics will allow us poor folk to see some of that wealth. I for one certainly already see the wealth that my lovely landlady possesses.

Let me preface that I think using vehicles as a primary source of transportation inherently scales poorly, and you can easily argue this by looking at how much a road costs versus a rail and how much mass you need to move per person on car versus train.

That being said, I really hate this article because it relies on anecdotes from various people and opinions without making any effort at citing relevant statistics. It literally cites the TOTAL number of pedestrian deaths to vehicles in 2022. I tried to find some statistics on right turn on red light, but all I could find were 20 year old or older studies, most of which actually concluded that right turn on red doesn't really account for a large number of pedestrian injuries and deaths. Like this one, for instance, which claims that right turning on green can also result in pedestrian accidents which could result in much more severe injuries (I can see how this might be true but there's no evidence to back this up.)

It's interesting for me to look at this from a utilitarian perspective: Surely there is a tradeoff between the amount of time wasted due to traffic increase due to right turn on red, and the time equivalent to the amount of lives lost due to RTOR (assuming RTOR results in more deaths). This of course is an incomplete/flawed way to look at things as we don't give highway collision motorists the death penalty for causing huge traffic blocks; iirc though it is how a lot of safety studies are done (look into how the statistical value of a human life is determined from highway transport administrations).

I would really appreciate if someone could chime in with some actual stats and numbers (though I doubt they're readily available) about the topic, rather than some anecdotal comments. I'm not a fan of symbolic legislation that doesn't provide real benefit (think plastic straws bullshit), and I would like to see a convincing take on whether or not this is that.