golli

I think a partial explanation can be that for most international tourists a visit to the USA is a major trip that gets planned well in advance. Easily half or even a full year ahead. Things only really got bad in the last few months, so we might still see many holidays that were planned before the madness fully set in. If that is the case I'd expect a continued decline in the future, where people choose another destination when deciding their next itinerary.

What is going on here?

I'm just an interested layman, but i'll give explaining it a try. I think this is more about whether or not Intel can stay in the market for leading edge manufacturing against TSMC.

The first thing to understand is that there are two parts to Intel: the manufacturing side and chip design.

In manufacturing leading edge chips they are primarily competing with TSMC (the clear market leader) and Samsung. In the past they used to be far ahead of the competition, but they screwed up that lead and are now behind. This is a very capital intensive market as fabs cost billions to build. And each new generation gets more and more expensive.

On the design side there are multiple different markets: servers, desktop/laptops, and mobile devices. Ever since losing out on producing the chip for the first iphone intel hasn't been a factor in the mobile market. Between servers and desktop/laptops, servers are the fastly more important and bigger market. Here they are competing with AMD, but also increasingly arm based processors, increasingly done by the large hyper scalers themselves (e.g. Amazon with their Graviton processors). Additionally with the ai boom the market has severely shifted towards gpus being vastly more important (which is dominated by nvidia).

Intel is relatively unique in that they still do both design and produce their own chips (not taking outside customers, but in recent times outsourcing some manufacturing to tsmc). Samsung also designs and produces their own arm based processors (exynos), but on a smaller scale and also has other customers. AMD used to have fabs in the past, but got rid of them (today called global foundries).

I would argue that here we need to primarily focus on the manufacturing, not design side. Even though they are also under pressure on the design side aswell and e.g. AMD is beating them in the server market.

It's more about whether or not Intel can hold on being in the leading edge race as manufacturer or drop out (like GlobalFoundries did a while back), which would leave us with only TSMC and Samsung (potentially China's SMIC, should they ever manage to develop their own EUV technology and catch up). No western manufacturer of leading edge chips, only asian ones that are heavily concentrated geographically and TSMC bearing a substantial geopolitical risk.

As mentioned above Intel has struggled with getting better process nodes working properly (especially in a timely manner) and costs are increasing by a lot. The issue is that now intel is severly cash strapped, as they've paid out massive dividends in the past when things were better and now that they've fallen behind earnings have disappeared (which is also why the mass layoffs).

Their competitor TSMC can spread the needed investment costs over many large customers such as apple, nvidia, amd and qualcomm. So far Intel manufactured purely for themselves and didn't take on external customers. With massively increasing costs it becomes obvious how this becomes less feasible on your own and scale increasingly becomes important. Especially if either/both the design or manufacturing side mess up and fall behind on delivering competitive products.

Switching to manufacturing for external customers is difficult. They have to adjust their internal processes to suit what customers are used to from others. There is a potential conflict of interest as Intel might at the same time be the customers rival (an issue TSMC as pure manufacturer doesn't have). And lastly customers need reliable schedules, if you are e.g. apple and release an iphone anually you need your manufactuerer to reliably deliver a workable node at a specific time and can't have it delayed (or even have the uncertainty of this happening).

They originally planned for their upcoming 18A (maybe even the axed 20A?) process to have external customers, but that didn't pan out (they will just produce some of their own products). Now they target external customers for the next generation 14A. Should they by then not have gotten their shit together enough to attract customers or be profitable Intel (the former giant of the semiconductor industry) will probably break apart and be done. At least in it's current form.

The fabs in germany and poland have been dead in the water for a while now from the moment they fell behind schedule and eventually were put on hold. This is just them officially axing those plans.

Exactly. And also i think it's hard to see those superhero movies aimed at establishing a franchise as something standalone.

[...] Superman is just the first step,” he added. “Over the next year alone, DC Studios will introduce the films Supergirl and Clayface in theaters and the series Lanterns on HBO Max, all part of a bold ten-year plan.

This excerpt from the article really says it all.

My line of thought is that yes the end goal is shareholder value/money, but the method varies. You can go for quality or quantity, or for long vs short term profits. And those steps in-between matter.

In this case with WB and Superman the amount of money an occasional Superman movie can make is not enough, they want that sweet franchise model. But you can't just will that into place, as they've demonstrated with their failure to do so so far.

There has to be some substance at the start before you can roll out even lesser IP and make bank like marvel. Which is why in this instance they probably don't care as much about the profit from this movie, but try to optimize it more for audience and critic appeal.

Apart from billionaire pet projects like Laika that might be true, but this seems a bit too reductionist. There are many ways to go about it and the difference matters. Unless you want to tell me the the whole media industry from Netflix to A24 does the exact same thing.

I think this is one of the few cases where the studio does care more about the critical and especially fan reception than the box office returns. They are trying to relaunch their whole franchise and this is one of the cornerstones.

Also $1b is just way off considering not a single superman movie has ever achieved it based on this source.

American Sweatshop: Watched it recently at a film festival, not sure if it can be watched somewhere else yet. Overall i liked it, but wasn't blown away by it. Going into it i was expecting it to be a bit more like On Falling, which imo has a somwhat similar setting with both protagonists working terrible minimum wage jobs (in content management and a amazon warehouse respectively). But where On Falling was more quiet/bleak and documentary like, American Sweatshop leaned more into having a thriller angle. Also still weird seeing reddit as a social media site in a movie.

Little Forest: Recently watched the Korean version of Little Forest from 2018 to compare it to the Japanese one Little Forest: Summer/Autumn and Winter/Spring from 2014/15. It wasn't bad, but i have to say i vastly prefer the japanese one, which imo is amazing; Just the perfect mix of delicious food, nature, farming, cozy atmosphere and great character development. This one just didn't manage to create the same vibe.

I mean in the server space Linux has already won and is doing just fine. Imo it is actually the reverse and sad that it needs this level of turmoil to get Europe to even think about software and digital infrastructure as fundamental. And even with all that's going on they are just dipping their toes into it rather than properly comitting to a radical shift. Hell, even with all that's going on some parts of the police here in Germany are still getting into bed with companies like Palantir.

You and all the companies training their AI models, like Meta for example

he consumed only vitamins, electrolytes, an unspecified amount of yeast (a source of all essential amino acids) and zero-calorie beverages such as tea, coffee, and sparkling water, although he occasionally added milk and/or sugar to the beverages, especially during the final weeks of the fast.

Worth mentioning imo, but you are right that most people should be fine fasting for some days if necessary. Although I would bet that almost everyone has a few days of food anyways. Unless you literally have empty shelves and buy groceries every day, most people will have a base stock of shelf stable foods like noodles, canned stuff, sugar, flour and so on.

Imo the limiting factor will be drinkable water most of the time. If something would cut off the supply immediately and for longer durations it would be a serious issue. Especially during warmer months.

Agreed. I hope this gains even more traction. Building a digital economy around support and service of free open source software with the requirement of personnel being local seems like the best way for Europe to finally become competitive.

My understanding would be:

• Probabilities: Chance of a certain outcome happening. E.g. Outcome A has a 70% chance B a 20% and C 10%

• Possibilities: what outcome scenarios exist. E.g. there exist 3 (A B C). Those Possibilities might have a probability associated with them

• Plausibility: looks at the degree of truth of a statement. So if it logically makes sense and is the correct answer/is what happened. You might make a judgement of the plausibility of a possibility based on the probability of it happening. Say if something has two outcomes one with a 99% chance and the other 1% then that might be the more plausible one. Or if it has no chance, then it might be implausible

Edit: since someone mentioned the example of a coin toss.

Head and tails have a probability of 50% each (for the sake of simplicity I assume it won't land standing up)

A coin toss has two possible outcomes (possibilities). Head and tails.

Someone says he flipped a coin and got head 1000 times in a row. That's not plausible with a fair coin because of the low chance of it actually happening (even if there is a indefinitely small chance). As a result you might assume he is either lying or the coin is weighted for that outcome.