mandevil

I don't think it is possible to beat the fab construction delays. This isn't about things being slow in the US: TSMC took four years to go from site selection to some production at their Fab 22 plant in Taiwan (it is currently only 60% built out, is my understanding). And TSMC is best in the world at getting frontier (logic) semiconductor fabs built, it took them slightly longer (five years) for Fab 21 in Arizona. Logic fabs are not the same as memory fabs, but they are close enough to be a good comparison for timeline.

Basically, unless you started fab construction (specifically to make memory chips) in 2023 you cannot change production for 2027 and 2028. The only thing that will affect prices between now and 2028 is demand, production can't go up because the fabs to make those chips don't exist. If you started now you might get memory chips in 2031, and can you bet 40 billion dollars that the demand will still be there? (A current generation logic fab costs about 20 billion. By 2031 a new frontier logic fab will cost about 40 billion- TSMC has committed to having one of these, Intel and Samsung are both holding off until someone will guarantee buying enough chips). I don't have prices for a current memory fab, but as I understand it they are comparable.)

In 1970 retail clerk is a medium-skill medium prestige job. There were lots of stories of people who started as a retail clerk and end up as CEO, and even people who aren't that ambitious could still carve out a comfortable middle class lifestyle as a retail clerk. But that's because there was a reward for experience. Before the laser/UPC/DB system rolled out, you needed at a glance to be able to know the price of an orange, or the difference between the expensive and the cheap mushroom. Because there would be a paper tag on every cheap mushroom that said "10 cents", but what if someone swapped that paper tag onto the expensive mushrooms that were supposed to cost 30 cents? You needed to know the difference, and have the real prices memorized to be able to be fast enough to keep the customers happy.

This also meant that you couldn't have a large retail store (something at the scale of the modern Walmart or Target), because you couldn't get enough clerks who could remember all the necessary prices and so inevitably you would lose money to tag switching. Department stores solved this by forcing you to buy each good separately in each department- you would pay for your housewares in the housewares section and your clothes in the clothes section, and they had another whole army of clerks in the basement managing store credit to keep it low-friction enough. But that's very high-touch, demanding a lot of workers, and those people still have the rewards of experience so they are all comfortable careers.

But then the laser/upc/database system came out. And suddenly you would get a natural language description of the item (or even a picture in the modern systems) from scanning the UPC. And you could scale the store up as much as you wanted, just needed to buy a bigger hard disk for the database, so the stores tilted more towards capital and less towards labor. And that eviscerated the career path of most retail stores, because store owners no longer believed that keeping retail clerks around benefited them.

This is machines hallowing out a job and alienating workers from their labor for the benefit of capital- exactly what Marx had described a century earlier for factory workers in Das Kapital. But for reasons of class and gender we mostly ignore retail clerks so it doesn't seem to have attracted near as much attention.

The difference is that Costco pays their employees well enough to keep them around (notice that Costco prints the start year on each employee badge- average retail length of service is 1 year, Costco keeps people around for decades) and so they can learn to use this older software and master it. Most retail operations optimize their inventory management for new people, because they don't expect someone to stick around long enough to master it.

My wife worked at a small regional chain of pharmacies that had an ancient MS-DOS based EHR system. And she mastered that system to the point where people would call her when she was home with me and ask her how to do something, and she would walk them through "okay, hit tab three times then shift-F12 then enter the frabble and then alt-F3 to go to the next screen and enter the drabble." It was difficult to learn it, but if you mastered it you could do everything you needed to do from just muscle memory while you were on the phone arguing with the doctor's office that their prescription was not correct and needed to be changed.

Then the small chain got bought by a national player and their brand new GUI system was brought in. It was a lot easier to learn- discoverability was a lot higher with menus and drop-downs and all of that. But if you stuck around to master it, you could never be as fast as you could with the older system. And that emphasis on quickly integrating new employees- but lower payoff for experience in employees- was clear in every choice that national chain made. They wanted their employees to be completely interchangeable, which meant that they didn't care if you had six months of experience or four years of experience or three decades of experience.

In upstate New York, I would recommend Autumn Crisp, Blondee, Macoun and Shizuka. I haven't picked apples in Virginia in about a decade, so I'm probably out of date on the right types to get there, but I remember loving Stayman apples.

And so the food scientists went to work, and figured out how to cross-breed in the ability to grow in a wider variety of places. And adding in the capability to grow in large numbers like the Red Delicious turned the Honeycrisp into an apple that tasted more like the Red Delicious.

The US is really amazingly good at growing food, but it is because the physical reality- not just transportation but growing conditions- trumps taste in the main.

And the destruction of Fallujah from Phantom Fury ended up only marginally better than what happened to Rafah (destroyed about a quarter of the buildings in Fallujah and damaged another quarter).

Something like this for oranges: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2026/04/florida-oran...

The thing about the "wages are low because of immigrants" is that it neglects that all of those immigrants are consumers just as much as they producers. They need food, medical care, places to relax, places to live, and so these immigrants employ plenty of native born people, people who would not have jobs if those immigrants weren't there consuming. Even if you could get higher wages to draw other native born people in from another part of the country, then you are just stealing the people and all of this sort of consumption from another part of your same country.

And I know that some Washington apple packing and Florida citrus packing companies have declared bankruptcy in the past year, so those would be my guesses.

I withdraw my statements about the HN community.

If you are going to do something that makes so many people so angry that they are willing to come to a local government meeting, you kinda have to let them talk about it, you know? Otherwise it feels like you're trying to run out the clock on them.

We did that because otherwise we would get 2x30 second timeouts to a dead service on every user interaction and it made for a terrible user experience. Keeping track and handling it smartly made the average user experience a lot better.

Microprocessors as a whole were a result of the US military industrial complex. The first large scale use of integrated circuits was the Minuteman II ballistic missile guidance system. The lineage that leads to the modern smartphone starts with Texas Instruments winning the contract for that military guidance system (first as a subcontractor to North American, then fully on their own).

Similarly, the first production use of a charge-coupled device for digital camera technology was the KH-11 spy satellite.

And I hit a Sunday matinee with my 9 year-old so it was $10.75/person, which felt worth it to me.

And the fact that it reinforced a message his mom and I have been trying to teach him (about the importance of not letting failure keep you from trying again) was a bonus for us.

Both KH-11 and Hubble had similar sized mirrors, but that wasn't because of design reuse, it was because that was the biggest primary mirror you could fit in the Space Shuttle cargo bay (1). In actual fact no KH-11 went into space on a Shuttle, but the plan up until the Challenger disaster had been for the STS to carry all US satellites into space, including the KH-11, which was designed around that cargo bay.

1: The space shuttle cargo bay was sized the way it was for NRO payloads, but it seems clear that the USAF wasn't thinking about KEEENAN when they requested that size- a design like that would be better if it was wider and didn't need to be nearly as long. My suspicion is, when NASA asked them what size they wanted for the bay, they took the last design they had- the just cancelled KH-10 Manned Orbiting Laboratory, and used that.

The key is that up until a few years ago basically the universal consensus was that sports gambling was not possible on a CFTC regulated exchange, then all of a sudden Kalshi did it and now they are trying to pay enough lawyers to get them to justify it. This ruling is not judicial legislation, this is demanding that companies actually follow the law.

From observation of having worked at 7-8 companies as a software dev, it sure seems to me that most CEO decisions could be replaced by AI easier than software dev work can.

This is a fundamental problem with "running government like a business," one of several that point to the fundamental flaws of the entire idea (profit motive, unitary unit of execution, etc.).

And that actually makes sense. Even for something like hospital management, the government is going to be different. Epic's EHR system can sell to bunches of hospitals and amortize most of their development work across all of those hospitals- there is only VA system and it is very different from how even a large hospital system functions (no insurance claims! lifetime tracking!), so adapting it is going to be painful.

And I do wonder if this is about the engineer mindset ('I've reduced this to a previously solved problem, I just let the subroutine handle it') or about the way that men are socialized in my culture (just take her out to dinner twice a year- Mother's Day and Valentine's- and remember her birthday and you're meeting social expectations) or what. But it's the biggest threat to my (and I'd hazard a guess most other) marriages.

As for how you end up with just those two, I think the answer is divorce: you don't spend the energy to maintain your relationship with your spouse. Before you had kids you could invest your time and energy in your spouse and your career, then the kids come along and your relationship with your spouse weakens, either all the way to divorce or to just a degraded state.

Two things I've heard from different ambitious women: "To really achieve, you need a wife" is something I've heard a lot- that it takes one parent sacrificing some of their career priority; traditionally that was the woman but it in theory could be the man (2), it just rarely is.

The other thing an ambitious woman told me once is that her mom told her "husband, career, kids, pick two." Basically, there is just only enough energy for a given person per day to invest in two of them. I've seen some women who managed, from the outside, to at least look successful at all three, but it's rare indeed.

1: When my kid was born the software company I worked for (I'm an American at an American company, but this was an area of competition for software devs at the time) offered a 14 week paid parental leave, even for men. Most men took a four week ("secondary caregiver" leave) and overlapped it with their wives 12 week unpaid FMLA. I took mine (14 week "primary caregiver") after my wife's leave expired, such that our kid had one of us caring for him every moment of his first six months. I remain convinced that was absolutely vital as the basis for both my relationship with my son and with my wife- she had to rely on me, trust me to care for the kid, and I couldn't hand him off, it was all on me every day. And so we both developed the parental muscles, could trust that the other one understood the reality of the situation, in a way that many father's don't get a chance. And that experience convinced me that the US needs maternal leave, obviously, but it also needs paternity leave- and the policies need to be designed such that the woman has to be back at work for at least some of the paternity leave, it can't all be used concurrently.

2: In a recent survey of American households https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-gr... about 55% of American heterosexual marriages the man makes 60% or more of the household income, about 30% both halves of the couple were between 40-60%, and just 16% saw the woman make more than 60% of the household income. In the majority of the 16% the woman still spent more time on unpaid household chores and carework than the man they were out-earning. Only in the 6% of heterosexual marriages where the woman earned 100% of the income did the number of hours per week in unpaid labor of men even equal that of their female partner.