> I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it.
It's easy to build factories, much more difficult to train the engineers required to run them... and let's not even talk about all the crazy regulations & environmental rules at the EU level that make that task even more difficult, because yes, chip factories do pollute... a lot.
Countries like South Korea or Taiwan have adapted all their legislations and tax, environmental regulations to allow such factories to operate easily. The EU and EU countries will never do that... better outsource pollution and claim they care about the planet...
I am a CAD engineer and software developer who has worked in manufacturing a lot in the UK in various industries - products as big as superyachts and as small as peristaltic pumps. I think if the UK and EU are to try and defend their weakening and shrinking manufacturing sectors (these industries have been disappearing for my entire adult life) then it is possible but difficult...In 10 to 20 years it will be impossible.
The reason is as you have described. We are getting close to where the numbers of people with practical experience working in, managing, and designing things like the work processes and factory layouts in industries that build physical products are disappearing. We're losing a lot of capable practical engineers with hands on experience. We can keep the universities going teaching the physical subjects but those lecturers wouldn't know even where to begin on designing and building efficient factories unfortunately.
We'd probably end up having to get Chinese and Taiwanese businesses to outsource their 'experts' back to us in order to actually do this and pay them a fortune - basically the reverse of what was happening in the manufacturing sector in the 80s and 90s!
This is going on for decades and I wonder what the actual business model for the EU economy is in the future. With all factories soon gone, will Europe rely on agriculture, tourism and some services only? Back to a "developing country" economy?
Even the most excellent education system takes several yeas to educate a high-schooler to a level of a junior engineer. Then several more years are needed for the best of them to become senior engineers, with the knowledge and experience that a university alone cannot provide.
So, we're looking at a decade-long project at least, even if everything goes as planned, and crazy fast, in the technical and administrative departments.
All the more reason to start now I guess. Putting it off isn't going to get them that knowledge and experience any sooner. If something happens over the next 10 years that eliminates our need for memory chips things will probably be either too messed up or too wonderful for anyone to cry over the years they needlessly spent trying to secure a domestic source of RAM.
> Doesn’t the EU have an excellent education system?
Excellent universities, overall. But results from primary and secondary schools are nose diving at a more than alarming rate in several EU countries. Literacy rates are falling, math grades are falling. There's IMO only so much time before universities begin to be affected as well.
> Doesn’t the EU have an excellent education system?
Well, the EU has not manufactured a whole lot of chips in the last 30 years, where do you get the people with the professional experience to teach new engineers... Oh you mean you have to import the teachers from South Asia too? /s and it takes what, 5 years at the minimum to train an engineer? France and UK used to produce entire home computers... in the 80's...
Come on, STM, Nordic, Infineon, NXP are all European. There is a bunch of chip-making installations in Dresden, Germany (Global Foundries, Bosch, etc), and there's Intel Fab 34 in Ireland. BTW TSMC is planning to open a production facility in Europe in 2027.
This is not comparable to Taiwan or the Shenzen area, but it's definitely not nothing. Some local expertise exists, even though it may be not the most cutting-edge.
ASML, which is based in the Netherlands, produces chip-making machines which TSMC and everyone else use to produce said chips. I think they got some expertise too :)
I find the idea that reality might be quantized fascinating, so that all information that exists could be stored in a storage medium big enough.
It's also kind of interesting how causality allegedly has a speed limit and it's rather slow all things considered.
Anyway, in 150 years we absolutely came a long way, we'll figure it that out eventually, but as always, figuring it out might lead even bigger questions and mysteries...
Note that "reality" is not quantized in any existing theory. Even in QM/QFT, only certain properties are quantized, such as mass or charge. Others, like position or time, are very much not quantized - the distance between two objects can very well be 2.5pi planck lengths. And not only are they not quantized, the math of these theories does not work if you try to discretize space or time or other properties.
> all information that exists could be stored in a storage medium big enough
Why is quantization necessary for information storage? If you're speculating about a storage device external to our universe, it need not be constrained by any of our physical laws and their consequences, such as by being made up of finitely many atoms or whatever. It might have components like arbitrary precision real number registers.
And if you're speculating about a storage device that lives within our universe, you have a contradiction because it's maximum information capacity can't exceed the information content of its own description.
If reality is quantized, how can you store all the information out there without creating a real simulation? (Essentially cloning the environment you want stored)
Issues, CI, and downloads for built binaries aren't part of vanilla Git. CI in particular can be hard if you make a multi-platform project and don't want to have to buy a new mac every few years.
Slavery is alive and well in most part of the world, especially south asia, middle east, Russia and Africa,where children with no papers are trafficked all the time for the worse things you could imagine. I'm not sure what convinced you otherwise.
Also in the USA. We call it "prison labor", and over 1% of our adult population is "under correctional control."
Approximately two-thirds (about 61% to over 65%) of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in US state and federal prisons are employed in prison labor, totaling around 800,000 workers. These workers often perform maintenance tasks for, on average, 13 to 52 cents per hour, with many facing forced labor conditions
https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-prison-labor/#...
There are also slaves you see outside your window without recognizing them as such. Homeless people are sometimes exploited by gang members who enslave them to either pimp themselves out or sell drugs.
One of the side effects of a society tolerating thousands of people living in nylon tarps with no real safety net.
I'm against for-profit prisons, but equating people who commit crimes and end up in prison and are forced to work as part of their sentence, to people who have committed no crimes is a bit ridiculous.
I understand your sentiment. Unfortunately, the history of America's legal system isn't simple. There are people in prison who never actually committed a crime, but who were convicted because they couldn't afford good legal representation during their trial. This disproportionately affects the poor, and there are correlations between poverty and minority status in America. Some people have been able to get their convictions overturned, but this typically requires very sympathetic people advocating for them.
There's also a very long history in America of laws and law enforcement being targeted against poor people and minorities. Vagrancy laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrancy#Post-Civil_War) and modern anti-homeless laws effectively criminalize homelessness, and the War on Drugs has had a major negative impact on poor people and minorities. Yes, in this situation those who have been imprisoned due to such laws did violate the law, but such laws, in my opinion, serve the function of kicking people while they are down rather than addressing the root causes of their poverty.
There's a good argument that having a system of convict labor creates a perverse incentive to fill that labor pipeline, similar to how well-meaning traffic laws (such as speed limits) can be abused (for example, "speed traps").
If you are open to a bit of reading I would recommend The New Jim Crow, Usual Cruelty, and Copoganda. The USA has a disproportionate amount of prisoners and armed law enforcement compared to every other comparable country - because it is a hugely profitable industry that self perpetuates itself really well- it’s similar in a way to how hard it is to get any consumer protections in USA from predatory and polluting entities.
After USA destabilized Libya, it turned horrible. In Libya there are open slave markets. Adults. Africans trying to who travel a great deal trying to get to Europe are often kidnapped and kept as slaves in Libya.
I'm well aware of Libya and its open air black slave markets, don't worry, an absolute disgrace what happened in Libya, and we could talk about Syria too and how The Yasidi were enslaved by Daesh...
It's easy to build factories, much more difficult to train the engineers required to run them... and let's not even talk about all the crazy regulations & environmental rules at the EU level that make that task even more difficult, because yes, chip factories do pollute... a lot.
Countries like South Korea or Taiwan have adapted all their legislations and tax, environmental regulations to allow such factories to operate easily. The EU and EU countries will never do that... better outsource pollution and claim they care about the planet...
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