I think that's becoming gold. That's why we're seeing the price action in it over the last few years. In a world with little trust, only gold is trusted. Even the Netherlands is repatriating a portion of their gold reserves from New York to London.
Hopefully not. We've lived that movie already with currencies tied to gold. It significantly slowed down past WW1 reconstruction, and is in general makes it very hard to adjust the money supply to enable economic recovery.
The ideal would be something like the International clearing currency proposed by Keynes durin Bretton Woods (he was overruled in favor of the dollar as reserve currency since America had all the power at the time).
I grew up in South Africa, and there was this classic newspaper cartoon back in the day: a kid goes to his dad and says "Dad, I want to become a criminal!" and the dad asks, "Government or private sector?"
The argument, which isn't entirely unreasonable, is that ICE cars are obviously paying a per-mile usage fee in the form of fuel taxes which supposedly (not always in practice) are supposed to be used to maintain roads. And it works sort-of, since very light cars (which do least damage to road surface) often have good fuel economy so they pay less tax per mile, vs. heavy trucks which do more wear on the road have usually worse mileage so end up paying more per mile in taxes. Not perfect of course, but approximately reasonable.
EVs break this system because they pay zero fuel taxes but are quite heavy (for their size) so they wear out the road like a heavier car but pay nothing.
The same thing happened in Afghanistan (to both Russia and the USA). Really has a David vs Goliath feel to it. Effectively the whole population is against you, so how do you win them over? No military strategy is going to be able to do that.
If only the Taliban had received half a trillion of military and financial support. If only China had shipped them thousands of FPV drones per day and given them access to low-latency satcom and a trillion-dollar ISR ecosystem.
> how do you win them over
Putin would have loved to. But, finally, even he has realized that that brotherly ship has sailed for a while. Luckily for him there’s an alternative: he just has to make sure Ukraine doesn’t come back from this in any threatening fashion any time soon. An effort that’s well underway and intensifying.
His other option would be what the West’s darling is doing in the Middle East, genocide. But Putin is not a monster.
I wonder if diamonds become cheap enough, and we are growing the crystal anyway, if we can introduce dopants and get interesting electrical properties.
This has been researched for decades, but progress is very slow.
Other wide bandgap semiconductors, i.e. silicon carbide (a.k.a. "moissanite" in jewelry) and gallium nitride are well on their way to make silicon completely obsolete for power semiconductor devices, but they are still many years away from reaching their full potential, in good part because their crystals have still too many defects in comparison with the crystals that can be grown from silicon. Because of too many crystal defects, for now the only commercial SiC devices are MOSFETs and Schottky diodes, despite the fact that SiC thyristors have exceptional properties for working with very high voltages, but bipolar semiconductor devices are much more sensitive to crystal defects, so their mass production is waiting for improvements in crystal growing.
Besides SiC and GaN, there are a few other semiconductors that have greater chances than diamond to become useful for semiconductor devices, e.g. gallium oxide or the sulfides of molybdenum and tungsten.
In diamond, there is not only the problem of crystal defects, but also the currently known dopants have various undesirable properties, like becoming active only at high temperatures, so some diamond electronic devices could be made to work in an oven or on the Venus surface, but not at room temperature.
While the use of diamond as a semiconductor is far in the future and there is no certainty that it will ever become able to replace silicon carbide, if artificial diamonds become cheap enough they might be used much more frequently for heatsinks, including in computers, as the material with the best thermal conductivity.
Diamond heatsinks are already in use, but only in niche applications where price is irrelevant.
I remember in the 90's there was some sort of shortage reportedly due to fires. In the end it was found the shortage was due to collusion by the manufacturers.
After the first two times, do they even need to collude?
Can't they count on each other doing the profitable thing? Especially when they PR it:
> Furthermore, focused investment in HBM is creating a virtuous cycle that improves profitability in the general-purpose memory market. As resources are diverted to HBM, the supply-demand balance for general DRAM is improving.
Is it actual demand or is it just a future IOU? I will buy ram in the future keep the door open for me (OpenAI)?
I think whatever happens it will be their last big payday because some of the companies that can do have the money and the capability are going to make plans to move away. From the Cartel.
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