I have no idea what the merits of the Japanese lithograph breakthrough are, but form a geopolitical standpoint, isn’t it bad to simplify chipmaking?
Currently the West is ahead of China in only two areas of manufacturing - chips and commercial aircraft. This is *because* these two are so incredibly complex that catching up is really hard.
If ASMLs tech dominance ceases to be a bottleneck, that seems primarily like a win for China. Especially if it’s slowed by a Japanese patent, which western companies will abide but Chinese certainly won’t.
I don't know how this new system works, but it is worth noting that the node names now are fake / marketing. A silicon atom is only ~0.2nm across, so 3nm is 15 atoms width. No actual feature on the chip is that small -- the "3nm" in the "3nm process" is entirely made up. Intel and TSMC have even used different names for similar processes before.
It sounds like this is part of the current cutting edge becoming the commodity of four years from now. As others noticed, this is about 7 nm chips while the leading edge right now is 3 nm, and the article says this might be commercialized a couple years from now.
"Meanwhile, the Biden administration has successfully used the Medicare system to negotiate some drug prices lower."
No, they didn't negotiate using monopsony power (which would be bad enough). They just applied price controls. Why are you pretending this is good for pharmaceuticals when you acknowledge how terrible it is for food?
The price for food isn’t being set with monopoly power; the price for many pharmaceuticals are set with monopoly power due to patents. The difference should be pretty clear.
Other countries combat this by having a dominant buyer negotiate prices down like Noah said. Because America historically barred Medicare from doing this, we've effectively been subsidizing drug innovation for the entire world and is one of the main reasons our drug prices are so much more expensive.
These aren’t negotiations, other than a Vito Corleone sense, and when drug companies find out they can’t recoup their research investments by amortization of the prices on the few compounds that are effective and pass the regulatory gauntlet then they will reduce investment, and they have already started doing so. A future world with fewer good drugs is not a good side effect of this negotiation policy.
They can not sell to Medicare and sell only to private insurers. And if that happened the elderly would flip out - so it’s a negotiation. The government can’t press them too far.
That's not correct. From ChatGPT: If a pharmaceutical company refuses to negotiate or fails to reach an agreement on a price for a drug, the company is subject to an excise tax. The tax starts at 65% of the drug's sales and increases by 10% every quarter, up to a maximum of 95%. Essentially, this penalty is designed to be so severe that non-compliance would be economically unfeasible for the company.
“If an agreement on the maximum fair price is not reached by August 1, 2024, manufacturers may be subject to an excise tax, which will be administered by the IRS, as specified in the Inflation Reduction Act. In the revised guidance, CMS outlined an expedited process manufacturers can follow if they choose to not participate in the negotiation program, which would enable them to withdraw their drugs from coverage under Medicare and Medicaid to avoid paying the excise tax.”
Or withdraw all drugs from Medicare Medicaid. It seems similar to what Walmart does with its vendors. If you want to sell to Walmart you need sell X% below your others customers and no one can sell it for less than Walmart.
Feds: Nice drug you’re selling there, shame if something were to happen to it. Give it to us for half price.
Big Pharma: No thanks, we’ll keep selling it worldwide , but not in the US. This will reduce our profit, so we’ll just layoff some chemists and stop doing new trials in the US.
Most Americans don’t pay for drugs themselves, either private insurance or Medicare does. I pay a lot in copayments but my insurance is bad and income is high. At least 3 drugs I’ve taken in the last 20 years have prevented me from dying .
Your knowledge is incomplete. Yes, the pharma compound it self maybe be patentable in "all major countries," if it is a brand new compound - a chemical that never existed before and also is not an obvious variation of a known chemical. Way more typically, the way pharma companies can get patent coverage in the US is for a method of treatment that includes delivering a therapeutic amount of the compound. Frequently, the drug companies are able to get claims on a new method of use of an otherwise known compound. These method of use claims are NOT patentable in any major country except the US. (I've been a patent lawyer for over three decades.)
"[W]e've effectively been subsidizing drug innovation for the entire world."
I agree with that, but we should find a way to make the rest of the world not be a bunch of free loaders. If we don't pay for drug innovation either, that just means no one will.
To make sure the rest of the world aren’t freeloaders, we need to have some sort of a dominant buyer! When the US pays less, other countries will have to pay more when it comes time for negotiations.
Markets for food are extremely competitive. Price controls under perfect competition lead to deadweight loss.
Markets for on-patent drugs are totally uncompetitive: One company has a legal monopoly, and it'll charge whatever it can get away with. Price controls here can be welfare-enhancing.
I acknowledge that patents changes things, but that just means these price controls will lead to a smaller supply of drugs in the pipeline instead of a smaller supply of current drugs. That's really bad!
Economics is a hard field. You can choose different charts and different measurements. It is a bit of the old canard, liars figure, figures lie.
The FBI stats are no longer the gold standard for reporting crime. The FBI doesn’t report on misdemeanors, so in many major cities, district Attorneys are dropping felonies to misdemeanors.
This distorts the picture of crime. In addition, in those cities, less crime is being reported. The public isn’t stupid, so why report a crime when the police no longer respond or care because the DA is doing nothing about that crime?
In addition to the FBI stats, you should look at the National Crime Victimization Survey. It shows that crime is much worse than Noah would have you believe. Noah could be ignorant of these issues with the FBI stats, or he could have fallen for let’s make the Joe Biden world look better for Kamala Harris.
This is the problem when pundits endorse a candidate or become Party cheerleaders. How do you look at the shade they might be throwing your way?
I'd like to point out that, with inflation, Kamala has employed the age-old and inaccurate bogeyman of corporate price gouging. It is part of her ignorant pablum she is serving up to quell the masses who are upset. Taking no responsibility for the inflation we have endured.
We do not live in Venezuela or the old Soviet Union. We have competition in many areas, including food. Price gouging can only occur when there are no substitutes. During the pandemic, there was complaints over the lack of beef and rising beef prices. Cargill and Tyson are two of the four biggest meat packers, followed by two Brazilian companies that comprise about 70% of US ground beef.
When the pandemic forced the closures of those plants, supply became constrained. Prices rose. Today, beef prices may rise by 5.5%. This is not due to price gouging; it is a supply issue again. Ranchers are suffering from a drought, so they cannot afford to feed their cows when grass is not available. They keep young cows for about a year before they might send them to a feedlot. Anyway, supply dictates pricing. Not price gouging. I am sure Noah can explain pricing better than I can.
Pricing is based on input costs, competitors’ pricing, and product advantages. Grocery stores work on a 1% to 2% profit margin. We have heavy competition in food stores and food pricing. Egg prices went up due to the Bird Flu and egg farmers had to kill their chickens.
The problem with inflation is the damage has been done. In the last 8 years or so, depending on the market, home prices rose 20 to 30 percent. Our salaries or incomes did not rise by that much. Add in higher interest costs and buying a car a home, credit cards, loan payments have all gone up. People are not happy about it. Their happiness is not Kamala Harris dependent. Joe Biden is responsible for some of the inflation we endured.
Is GDP doing well? Yes. Is the market doing well? My IRA is not back to where it was in Jan of 2022. For some it may be. Are rents higher? Yes, way higher. So, the economic picture is mixed....at best.
Where you stand depends on where you sit. If you are a young couple looking for housing, your not very happy at this moment.
>The FBI doesn’t report on misdemeanors, so in many major cities, district Attorneys are dropping felonies to misdemeanors.
It is my understanding that 1) the reports are from police departments, not DAs offices; 2) the reports are re offenses known to law enforcement , not arrests (which are reported separately), and not charges
I knew the man whose PhD thesis made all off axis aberration correction optics posssible for Semiconductors and spy satellites and advanced large telescopes. It is heart warming to remember him with this Shintake work on off axis and apparently on axis all mirror corrected optics for EUV
Kevin Thompson was one of the most brilliant people I've met. Including going to MIT and working with many PhD.
His inventive work is called Nodal Aberration Theory. It's a work based on the advancement of Nobel Frits Zerniki, called the Zerniki polynomial. These accurately describe the wave forms of refractive and reflecting light into components like spherical, coma, etc. I think you'd like these Noah.
Kevin Thompson work is considered the greatest advancement in optics of the last half century.
"This configuration is unimaginably simple,” Shintake says, “given that conventional projectors require at least six reflective mirrors. This was made possible by carefully rethinking the aberration correction theory of optics.”…Furthermore, “the performance has been verified using optical simulation software and it is guaranteed to be sufficient for the production of advanced semiconductors."
And that software is CODE V. The world's oldest and continuously used software since about 1962 origins. Optical design is the most precise and most toleranced engineering in the world.
I may be biased, but I suspect Nikon wouldn’t be able to make a superior EUV machine out of the new OIST tech. EUV has a dozen other critical requirements, including that the entire illumination path has to be in a vacuum.
The big thing that makes EUV so difficult isn’t illumination itself, it’s having a thousand-plus components, any one of which can fail and take the whole machine hard down. ASML
has spent most of the last 3 decades working on reliability so that the machine is actually PROFITABLE to own, not merely trying to come up with fancy new tech.
This new design reduces complexity and energy use, which while not eliminating the other difficult issues it shouldn’t make them worse. Having a Japanese competitor for ASML would be a very good thing, having all the free world’s highest performance semiconductors depend on two factories, TSMC’s in perilous Taiwan and ASML’s in below sea-level Netherlands is risky.
1. Eindhoven is in the relative uplands of NL. Also, a goodly chunk of ASML’s US operations are WELL above sea level.
2. Nikon already IS a competitor in certain contested market segments, and these are actually where both companies make most of their profit. ASML doesn’t profit as much from EUV.
3. Nikon barely has any EUV capacity to speak of. They’d literally be better off — that is, make more money on it — licensing the OIST tech to ASML than trying to do 3 decades of catch-up on reliability.
I swear to God, I did not think that trump could top himself, but he did.
"It's actually much better because EVERYONE gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they're soldiers. They're either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets or they are dead.”
Gee, I really hope that no recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor had to receive it from Trump.
Bing co-pilot just informed me that Trump awarded three Medals of Honor during his presidency. One of the recipients was deceased.
I’ll have a read of Yglesias’ posts on the topic again, as I confess to have primarily skimmed them. You’re an economist and this is much more your bailiwick, but as a relatively progressive person my counter would be that although the EITC and CTC are good, they are basically just cash transfers. Again, plenty of evidence that cash transfers are good! And efficient! But I also think it misses a bit of what anti-neoliberals actually want (and are maybe not great at articulating due to “redistribution” being such a widely adopted and relevant word.
What I think has genuinely been lost in the Neoliberal era is a redistribution toward collective resources (parks, libraries, social centres, job training, etc.)
Living in Australia, all of the above have significant issues, of course, but there is just much much more public resource available to everyone.
My point, if I have one, is that the charts may show distribution improving, but rich nations have *added* population under the poverty line, and corporate profits / the assets of the very wealthy have all significantly increased.
Again, you would know better, but my take has always been that some level of rebalancing government reliance from income-based taxation to asset- based (not all the way! That’s mental!) would end up in more generalised and productive redistribution.
Anyway, it’s a perfect Sunday in Melbourne, and I enjoyed starting my morning with this piece.
Sounds like you’ve making two suggestions. First, that the US could use more public amenities which I’m not really in a position as a Canadian to judge but is probably true.
Second that more government revenue should come from taxing wealth? I would disagree with this and suggest that what you really want is more revenue coming from taxing *consumption*. A straight up sales tax is regressive but there are other options like a Frankian progressive consumption tax or a high sales tax combined with a robust system of tax exemptions in key categories that skew towards people with less money (groceries, education, health and medical, etc).
In any case I’d love to hear Noah’s thoughts on this.
Well... no, not really. Any tax on consumption (and income, for that matter) is a tax on transactions. Ultimately, that would not do much to deter the stockpiling of assets for those who can do so (and, similarly, moving said assets without direct transactions, like gifting or inheritance) Consumption taxes would - by my limited understanding - act in a similar way to Capital Gains taxes, but - again - this is flawed because it only applies at the moment of a transaction.
To be fair, most US-states do have property taxes (most of Aus does not) which is a start, but realistically, there's no reason that a hoarding of resources in private hands should be rewarded. Consumption taxes sound good for a Bond-villain like Roman Abramovich, but for a VW-Polo driving Warren Buffet, not terribly effective.
Essentially my point is that whilst *income and taxes* are gradually getting better-distributed, *assets and wealth* are not, and the latter is ultimately as damaging as the former is encouraging, if not more so.
Rich nations have not added population below the global poverty line. Most population growth is in impoverished nations and the poverty line in each nation is relative to that nations wealth.
Neoliberals. The problem is the entrenched bureaucrats do such a lousy job of allocating resources and insuring that the funds are put to good use. The apparatchiks have no accountability. In the mean time , the government deficit goes up and interest payments crowd out use for future projects. And, there’s too many virtue signaling non productive universal income types who don’t contribute enough to the system to really mutualize the system for the betterment of all.
<blockquote> Of course, it’s possible to do this too much, to a degree that hurts innovation in the pharmaceutical space. So that has to be carefully monitored. But pharma innovation is alive and well in Europe and Asia, so it’s possible to get consumer savings while preserving a robust innovation ecosystem.</blockquote>
These EU & Asian pharma companies sell in the American market, no? What makes you think that you can infer everything you need to know about the market dynamics of the European and Asian pharmaceutical industries just by looking at their domestic markets?
The Biden admin via ARPA-H also continues to make exciting bets on health abundance technology that could benefit the world eventually:
“If successful, these technologies will revolutionize surgeries, dramatically reducing rates of repeat procedures. They can also reduce instances of unintentional injury to critical structures such as nerves, blood vessels or lymph ducts. These imaging tools may also be used to improve other types of surgeries.”
I have an issue with your inclusion of an extrapolated trend line to the graph of homicide rates without explaining why homicide rates should be following a trend. Criminology is not physics; Newton’s laws of motion do not apply. Trends in crime rates are not obliged to follow mathematically specified
trajectories. They have no intrinsic momentum. It cannot be assumed that trends will continue by themselves; there must be reasons for continuation. A valid prediction requires better explanatory variables than the simple passage of time. Without such justification, you should be comparing the 2020-24 rates to the 2010-2019 average.
Maybe Canon could build the Shintake mirror reduction idea (10x power reduction by reduced losses) into their own stamping idea (90% power reduction by stamping instead of etching) for a double win, and then see how ASML responds. Or even if Nikon and Canon both start competing with ASML it we be good for all.
The discussion on "income inequality" is a bit different than "wealth inequality". A lot of capital returns don't necessarily show up as income in the usual income inequality calculations.
And there is also other data that shows a different trend than the CBO chart ....
Also, note that the public spending rise seems to be just about the point of the ACA passing. I'd be curious to see this diagram broken down by the different kinds of spending - and whether most of this change is accounted for by one particular action (or a couple) and whether some others shrank
Regarding footnote #1. When I was investing in a pharmaceutical company based outside of the US the most important factor to whether our innovation would be compensated was US approval.
If Luxembourg successfully negotiated the cost to zero innovation in Luxembourgish pharma wouldn't stop because the market is globalized.
This means that the US paying meaningfully less could harm innovation and even if Canada pays the same rate it will **not provide a canary in the coal mine!**
I have no idea what the merits of the Japanese lithograph breakthrough are, but form a geopolitical standpoint, isn’t it bad to simplify chipmaking?
Currently the West is ahead of China in only two areas of manufacturing - chips and commercial aircraft. This is *because* these two are so incredibly complex that catching up is really hard.
If ASMLs tech dominance ceases to be a bottleneck, that seems primarily like a win for China. Especially if it’s slowed by a Japanese patent, which western companies will abide but Chinese certainly won’t.
If the genie is out of the bottle on simplified chip making, it's bad to be behind!
It’s says 7nm, isn’t the state of the art 3nm? 7nm “and smaller” seems to be doing a lot of the work - how much smaller?
I don't know how this new system works, but it is worth noting that the node names now are fake / marketing. A silicon atom is only ~0.2nm across, so 3nm is 15 atoms width. No actual feature on the chip is that small -- the "3nm" in the "3nm process" is entirely made up. Intel and TSMC have even used different names for similar processes before.
https://read.nxtbook.com/ieee/spectrum/spectrum_na_august_2020/the_node_is_nonsense.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20220807181530/https://irds.ieee.org/editions/2021/more-moore
It sounds like this is part of the current cutting edge becoming the commodity of four years from now. As others noticed, this is about 7 nm chips while the leading edge right now is 3 nm, and the article says this might be commercialized a couple years from now.
"Meanwhile, the Biden administration has successfully used the Medicare system to negotiate some drug prices lower."
No, they didn't negotiate using monopsony power (which would be bad enough). They just applied price controls. Why are you pretending this is good for pharmaceuticals when you acknowledge how terrible it is for food?
The price for food isn’t being set with monopoly power; the price for many pharmaceuticals are set with monopoly power due to patents. The difference should be pretty clear.
Other countries combat this by having a dominant buyer negotiate prices down like Noah said. Because America historically barred Medicare from doing this, we've effectively been subsidizing drug innovation for the entire world and is one of the main reasons our drug prices are so much more expensive.
These aren’t negotiations, other than a Vito Corleone sense, and when drug companies find out they can’t recoup their research investments by amortization of the prices on the few compounds that are effective and pass the regulatory gauntlet then they will reduce investment, and they have already started doing so. A future world with fewer good drugs is not a good side effect of this negotiation policy.
https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/big-pharma-cuts-r-d-sending-shudders-through-industry-18fc4cf0?st=tuxe4bk69scrsgi
They can not sell to Medicare and sell only to private insurers. And if that happened the elderly would flip out - so it’s a negotiation. The government can’t press them too far.
That's not correct. From ChatGPT: If a pharmaceutical company refuses to negotiate or fails to reach an agreement on a price for a drug, the company is subject to an excise tax. The tax starts at 65% of the drug's sales and increases by 10% every quarter, up to a maximum of 95%. Essentially, this penalty is designed to be so severe that non-compliance would be economically unfeasible for the company.
Not true under the revised guidance.
“If an agreement on the maximum fair price is not reached by August 1, 2024, manufacturers may be subject to an excise tax, which will be administered by the IRS, as specified in the Inflation Reduction Act. In the revised guidance, CMS outlined an expedited process manufacturers can follow if they choose to not participate in the negotiation program, which would enable them to withdraw their drugs from coverage under Medicare and Medicaid to avoid paying the excise tax.”
https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/faqs-about-the-inflation-reduction-acts-medicare-drug-price-negotiation-program/
Or withdraw all drugs from Medicare Medicaid. It seems similar to what Walmart does with its vendors. If you want to sell to Walmart you need sell X% below your others customers and no one can sell it for less than Walmart.
Feds: Nice drug you’re selling there, shame if something were to happen to it. Give it to us for half price.
Big Pharma: No thanks, we’ll keep selling it worldwide , but not in the US. This will reduce our profit, so we’ll just layoff some chemists and stop doing new trials in the US.
What’s the point of continually developing drugs if people can’t afford to take them?
Most Americans don’t pay for drugs themselves, either private insurance or Medicare does. I pay a lot in copayments but my insurance is bad and income is high. At least 3 drugs I’ve taken in the last 20 years have prevented me from dying .
“I pay a lot in copayments” … not only that but you’re also paying for these higher prices through higher insurance premiums
The US is one of the few (only?) countries that grant patents on pharmaceuticals, as well as on medical diagnostic and therapeutic methods.
To my knowledge, all major countries have similar patent policies for pharmaceuticals.
Your knowledge is incomplete. Yes, the pharma compound it self maybe be patentable in "all major countries," if it is a brand new compound - a chemical that never existed before and also is not an obvious variation of a known chemical. Way more typically, the way pharma companies can get patent coverage in the US is for a method of treatment that includes delivering a therapeutic amount of the compound. Frequently, the drug companies are able to get claims on a new method of use of an otherwise known compound. These method of use claims are NOT patentable in any major country except the US. (I've been a patent lawyer for over three decades.)
"[W]e've effectively been subsidizing drug innovation for the entire world."
I agree with that, but we should find a way to make the rest of the world not be a bunch of free loaders. If we don't pay for drug innovation either, that just means no one will.
To make sure the rest of the world aren’t freeloaders, we need to have some sort of a dominant buyer! When the US pays less, other countries will have to pay more when it comes time for negotiations.
Markets for food are extremely competitive. Price controls under perfect competition lead to deadweight loss.
Markets for on-patent drugs are totally uncompetitive: One company has a legal monopoly, and it'll charge whatever it can get away with. Price controls here can be welfare-enhancing.
I acknowledge that patents changes things, but that just means these price controls will lead to a smaller supply of drugs in the pipeline instead of a smaller supply of current drugs. That's really bad!
Well, we could spend 100% of GDP on pharma, and that would lead to a better pipeline. Would that be good?
Does it set a price control or will other private actors pay a different price?
Monopsony power is when Medicare sets a limit on what *it* will pay. A price control would be when the government limits what third parties can pay
Economics is a hard field. You can choose different charts and different measurements. It is a bit of the old canard, liars figure, figures lie.
The FBI stats are no longer the gold standard for reporting crime. The FBI doesn’t report on misdemeanors, so in many major cities, district Attorneys are dropping felonies to misdemeanors.
This distorts the picture of crime. In addition, in those cities, less crime is being reported. The public isn’t stupid, so why report a crime when the police no longer respond or care because the DA is doing nothing about that crime?
In addition to the FBI stats, you should look at the National Crime Victimization Survey. It shows that crime is much worse than Noah would have you believe. Noah could be ignorant of these issues with the FBI stats, or he could have fallen for let’s make the Joe Biden world look better for Kamala Harris.
This is the problem when pundits endorse a candidate or become Party cheerleaders. How do you look at the shade they might be throwing your way?
I'd like to point out that, with inflation, Kamala has employed the age-old and inaccurate bogeyman of corporate price gouging. It is part of her ignorant pablum she is serving up to quell the masses who are upset. Taking no responsibility for the inflation we have endured.
We do not live in Venezuela or the old Soviet Union. We have competition in many areas, including food. Price gouging can only occur when there are no substitutes. During the pandemic, there was complaints over the lack of beef and rising beef prices. Cargill and Tyson are two of the four biggest meat packers, followed by two Brazilian companies that comprise about 70% of US ground beef.
When the pandemic forced the closures of those plants, supply became constrained. Prices rose. Today, beef prices may rise by 5.5%. This is not due to price gouging; it is a supply issue again. Ranchers are suffering from a drought, so they cannot afford to feed their cows when grass is not available. They keep young cows for about a year before they might send them to a feedlot. Anyway, supply dictates pricing. Not price gouging. I am sure Noah can explain pricing better than I can.
Pricing is based on input costs, competitors’ pricing, and product advantages. Grocery stores work on a 1% to 2% profit margin. We have heavy competition in food stores and food pricing. Egg prices went up due to the Bird Flu and egg farmers had to kill their chickens.
The problem with inflation is the damage has been done. In the last 8 years or so, depending on the market, home prices rose 20 to 30 percent. Our salaries or incomes did not rise by that much. Add in higher interest costs and buying a car a home, credit cards, loan payments have all gone up. People are not happy about it. Their happiness is not Kamala Harris dependent. Joe Biden is responsible for some of the inflation we endured.
Is GDP doing well? Yes. Is the market doing well? My IRA is not back to where it was in Jan of 2022. For some it may be. Are rents higher? Yes, way higher. So, the economic picture is mixed....at best.
Where you stand depends on where you sit. If you are a young couple looking for housing, your not very happy at this moment.
>The FBI doesn’t report on misdemeanors, so in many major cities, district Attorneys are dropping felonies to misdemeanors.
It is my understanding that 1) the reports are from police departments, not DAs offices; 2) the reports are re offenses known to law enforcement , not arrests (which are reported separately), and not charges
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Rolland_Thompson
I knew the man whose PhD thesis made all off axis aberration correction optics posssible for Semiconductors and spy satellites and advanced large telescopes. It is heart warming to remember him with this Shintake work on off axis and apparently on axis all mirror corrected optics for EUV
Kevin Thompson was one of the most brilliant people I've met. Including going to MIT and working with many PhD.
His inventive work is called Nodal Aberration Theory. It's a work based on the advancement of Nobel Frits Zerniki, called the Zerniki polynomial. These accurately describe the wave forms of refractive and reflecting light into components like spherical, coma, etc. I think you'd like these Noah.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zernike_polynomials
Kevin Thompson work is considered the greatest advancement in optics of the last half century.
"This configuration is unimaginably simple,” Shintake says, “given that conventional projectors require at least six reflective mirrors. This was made possible by carefully rethinking the aberration correction theory of optics.”…Furthermore, “the performance has been verified using optical simulation software and it is guaranteed to be sufficient for the production of advanced semiconductors."
And that software is CODE V. The world's oldest and continuously used software since about 1962 origins. Optical design is the most precise and most toleranced engineering in the world.
https://www.synopsys.com/optical-solutions/codev.html
I would estimate that 90% of the world's semiconductors are made with optical systems using CODE V.
I may be biased, but I suspect Nikon wouldn’t be able to make a superior EUV machine out of the new OIST tech. EUV has a dozen other critical requirements, including that the entire illumination path has to be in a vacuum.
The big thing that makes EUV so difficult isn’t illumination itself, it’s having a thousand-plus components, any one of which can fail and take the whole machine hard down. ASML
has spent most of the last 3 decades working on reliability so that the machine is actually PROFITABLE to own, not merely trying to come up with fancy new tech.
This new design reduces complexity and energy use, which while not eliminating the other difficult issues it shouldn’t make them worse. Having a Japanese competitor for ASML would be a very good thing, having all the free world’s highest performance semiconductors depend on two factories, TSMC’s in perilous Taiwan and ASML’s in below sea-level Netherlands is risky.
1. Eindhoven is in the relative uplands of NL. Also, a goodly chunk of ASML’s US operations are WELL above sea level.
2. Nikon already IS a competitor in certain contested market segments, and these are actually where both companies make most of their profit. ASML doesn’t profit as much from EUV.
3. Nikon barely has any EUV capacity to speak of. They’d literally be better off — that is, make more money on it — licensing the OIST tech to ASML than trying to do 3 decades of catch-up on reliability.
I swear to God, I did not think that trump could top himself, but he did.
"It's actually much better because EVERYONE gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they're soldiers. They're either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets or they are dead.”
Gee, I really hope that no recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor had to receive it from Trump.
Bing co-pilot just informed me that Trump awarded three Medals of Honor during his presidency. One of the recipients was deceased.
I’ll have a read of Yglesias’ posts on the topic again, as I confess to have primarily skimmed them. You’re an economist and this is much more your bailiwick, but as a relatively progressive person my counter would be that although the EITC and CTC are good, they are basically just cash transfers. Again, plenty of evidence that cash transfers are good! And efficient! But I also think it misses a bit of what anti-neoliberals actually want (and are maybe not great at articulating due to “redistribution” being such a widely adopted and relevant word.
What I think has genuinely been lost in the Neoliberal era is a redistribution toward collective resources (parks, libraries, social centres, job training, etc.)
Living in Australia, all of the above have significant issues, of course, but there is just much much more public resource available to everyone.
My point, if I have one, is that the charts may show distribution improving, but rich nations have *added* population under the poverty line, and corporate profits / the assets of the very wealthy have all significantly increased.
Again, you would know better, but my take has always been that some level of rebalancing government reliance from income-based taxation to asset- based (not all the way! That’s mental!) would end up in more generalised and productive redistribution.
Anyway, it’s a perfect Sunday in Melbourne, and I enjoyed starting my morning with this piece.
Sounds like you’ve making two suggestions. First, that the US could use more public amenities which I’m not really in a position as a Canadian to judge but is probably true.
Second that more government revenue should come from taxing wealth? I would disagree with this and suggest that what you really want is more revenue coming from taxing *consumption*. A straight up sales tax is regressive but there are other options like a Frankian progressive consumption tax or a high sales tax combined with a robust system of tax exemptions in key categories that skew towards people with less money (groceries, education, health and medical, etc).
In any case I’d love to hear Noah’s thoughts on this.
Well... no, not really. Any tax on consumption (and income, for that matter) is a tax on transactions. Ultimately, that would not do much to deter the stockpiling of assets for those who can do so (and, similarly, moving said assets without direct transactions, like gifting or inheritance) Consumption taxes would - by my limited understanding - act in a similar way to Capital Gains taxes, but - again - this is flawed because it only applies at the moment of a transaction.
To be fair, most US-states do have property taxes (most of Aus does not) which is a start, but realistically, there's no reason that a hoarding of resources in private hands should be rewarded. Consumption taxes sound good for a Bond-villain like Roman Abramovich, but for a VW-Polo driving Warren Buffet, not terribly effective.
Essentially my point is that whilst *income and taxes* are gradually getting better-distributed, *assets and wealth* are not, and the latter is ultimately as damaging as the former is encouraging, if not more so.
My limited understanding of wealth taxes is that they generally get repealed because they’re difficult to implement and don’t end up accomplishing what was intended. If you have a sub Noah writes about them here https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/here-are-some-better-versions-of?utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
For the US he suggests some changes to the capital gains regime instead.
Rich nations have not added population below the global poverty line. Most population growth is in impoverished nations and the poverty line in each nation is relative to that nations wealth.
Neoliberals. The problem is the entrenched bureaucrats do such a lousy job of allocating resources and insuring that the funds are put to good use. The apparatchiks have no accountability. In the mean time , the government deficit goes up and interest payments crowd out use for future projects. And, there’s too many virtue signaling non productive universal income types who don’t contribute enough to the system to really mutualize the system for the betterment of all.
<blockquote> Of course, it’s possible to do this too much, to a degree that hurts innovation in the pharmaceutical space. So that has to be carefully monitored. But pharma innovation is alive and well in Europe and Asia, so it’s possible to get consumer savings while preserving a robust innovation ecosystem.</blockquote>
These EU & Asian pharma companies sell in the American market, no? What makes you think that you can infer everything you need to know about the market dynamics of the European and Asian pharmaceutical industries just by looking at their domestic markets?
The Biden admin via ARPA-H also continues to make exciting bets on health abundance technology that could benefit the world eventually:
“If successful, these technologies will revolutionize surgeries, dramatically reducing rates of repeat procedures. They can also reduce instances of unintentional injury to critical structures such as nerves, blood vessels or lymph ducts. These imaging tools may also be used to improve other types of surgeries.”
https://arpa-h.gov/news-and-events/arpa-h-announces-awards-develop-novel-technologies-precise-tumor-removal
I have an issue with your inclusion of an extrapolated trend line to the graph of homicide rates without explaining why homicide rates should be following a trend. Criminology is not physics; Newton’s laws of motion do not apply. Trends in crime rates are not obliged to follow mathematically specified
trajectories. They have no intrinsic momentum. It cannot be assumed that trends will continue by themselves; there must be reasons for continuation. A valid prediction requires better explanatory variables than the simple passage of time. Without such justification, you should be comparing the 2020-24 rates to the 2010-2019 average.
“This was made possible by carefully rethinking the aberration correction theory of optics.”…
Professor Shintake, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology
And then there’s Canon, which has done optics for decades:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/new-stamping-chipmaking-technique-uses-90-less-power-than-euv-canon-to-ship-the-first-nanoimprint-litho-tools-to-customers-this-year-or-next
Maybe Canon could build the Shintake mirror reduction idea (10x power reduction by reduced losses) into their own stamping idea (90% power reduction by stamping instead of etching) for a double win, and then see how ASML responds. Or even if Nikon and Canon both start competing with ASML it we be good for all.
If NEPA blocks rational decision-making in one area, why is its blanket coverage in other areas sensible?
https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/a-fifth-of-u-s-green-hydrogen-projects-eyed-for-water-stressed-areas?utm_source=importantnotimportant.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=school-s-in-but-out-of-money&_bhlid=fa69bcad6665da786d39ccd772a0f92ef4fbd4ef
Could a policy possibly be more geographically misplaced?
The discussion on "income inequality" is a bit different than "wealth inequality". A lot of capital returns don't necessarily show up as income in the usual income inequality calculations.
And there is also other data that shows a different trend than the CBO chart ....
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/
Also, note that the public spending rise seems to be just about the point of the ACA passing. I'd be curious to see this diagram broken down by the different kinds of spending - and whether most of this change is accounted for by one particular action (or a couple) and whether some others shrank
Unfortunately OWID doesn't break this down - perhaps one of its sources has that info
Regarding footnote #1. When I was investing in a pharmaceutical company based outside of the US the most important factor to whether our innovation would be compensated was US approval.
If Luxembourg successfully negotiated the cost to zero innovation in Luxembourgish pharma wouldn't stop because the market is globalized.
This means that the US paying meaningfully less could harm innovation and even if Canada pays the same rate it will **not provide a canary in the coal mine!**