Why? Rice is what you eat if you can't afford anything better. This parallels every other culture - the staple food will keep you alive, but if you have any money, you'll eat something better than that.
You know how "bread and water" is considered a terrible diet that only prisoners eat, and then only because they're not given a choice?
(And how modern prisoners get a much better diet?)
Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare. Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.
Rice and tea (ochazuke) is historically the "bread and water" equivalent in Japan, but people of every socioeconomic class still eat rice and miso soup for breakfast, eat rice balls (onigiri) regularly, and generally eat a diet with a lot of rice.
Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.
I wouldn't be surprised if the middle class and lower class eat more-or-less identical quantities of rice.
> Bread and water is prisoner food, but avocado toast and cream-cheese bagels at the corner bodega are considered mid-to-upper-class fare.
That's not an example of nuance. An expensive fruit and a heavily-processed cheese are much higher-grade food than bread is.
> Pasta (also wheat) can range from kraft mac-and-cheese (poor-coded) to hand-made pasta with pesto sauce.
Same thing; cheese is a high-grade food, and even pesto is chock full of fat.
> Even though rice is the staple food of Japan, I'd actually argue that instant ramen is much more poor-coded these days than even ochazuke.
And this is a statement that even the poorest people in Japan aren't so poor that they have to subsist on rice. There's no question about which of instant ramen or ochazuke is a better meal. Instant ramen comes with tons of spices, fats, salt, some vegetables, and even a little meat.
Complex processors like AMD Athlon and Intel Pentium 4, which were made in 180 nm a quarter of century ago, had clock frequencies between 1 GHz and 2 GHz. Pentium 4 used internally a double frequency clock for the simpler 32-bit arithmetic-logic units, i.e. up to around 4 GHz.
Today the manufacturing process could be better optimized than 25 years ago, so some logic circuits much simpler than a 64-bit CPU (the previous were 32-bit CPUs for integers, but they had 64-bit/80-bit FPUs working at full speed), i.e. with much less gate delays per pipeline stage, might be able to reach 12 GHz.
However, something like a 64-bit ALU will certainly not reach 12 GHz. Even a 32-bit ALU is very unlikely to reach 12 GHz. Simple things, like shift registers and Galois-field counters, might reach such speeds, or even higher.
The next CMOS process generation, i.e. 130 nm, already allows making complex processors with more than a half of the maximum clock frequency of the fastest processors of today. It also allows making analog amplifiers and mixers for the 5 GHz WiFi frequency bands.
This is plainly wrong. I'm a chip designer. There's no way to implement a DFF operating at 12 GHz in 180nm, period. This isn't an optimization problem, it is physics.
[2] "If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C. Clarke
Because you can just look into it and see if it's what you sent fof production, and if not and the word gets out you are done as a fab. Fab business is about trust. You also should trust that your design isn't leaked to the competition.
It's very common to xray the dies, especially for debugging. Also common is to etch it layer by layer, take photos and rebuild the circuit schematic, mainly for reverse engineering but I've seen companies doing it to their own dies too.
Things get more blurry at the board level, the combinations of suppliers and service providers are endless.
That's one way to make sure people living under aerial bombing firmly support a regime defending their sovereignty, hence legitimizing the islamic republic. Example: Taliban, with boots on the ground, didn't get any weaker at the end.
Instead of this we have anti dual-use policies, especially in semiconductor. Any chip a fab produces need hefty paper work to prove it cannot be used for military. This is due to the military-industrial complex lobby. They don't want cheap competition.
Apparently 14 K cooling is not used even up to 5N or 6N purity, commercial large-scale sources use various other tricks to remove the other gases. They do cool the input gas down to liquid nitrogen temperatures as one of the first steps.
My point is that there's "maximally efficient / profitable" versus "can be made available as an emergency alternative".
Cooling to 14 K isn't the cheapest option, but it has very low complexity. You can "simply" pressurise the source gas, cool it to room temperature through an ordinary heat exchanger, then allow it to expand. The only issue is that if you do this naively, the expansion nozzle will get clogged with ice.
Obviously, this wastes a lot of Helium, but we have lots of it. If what's needed is high purity Helium, then throwing away even 90% to get 10% that's 6N pure should be no problem for an industrial nation.
You can't just spin up such a facility in a few days or weeks though, surely? Even if the core of a process is relatively simple physically, you still need all the supporting infrastructure to make it happen.
Starting from an empty lot, no, it would take nearly a year.
However, any air (or gas) liquefaction / separation plant that is already making purified industrial gases from air or other sources could be adapted in a matter of weeks or at most a couple of months.
> Alaska and Norway understood something critical when oil was discovered: if you don't assert collective ownership of the resource before private companies capture all the value, you never will. Alaska amended its constitution. Norway built the largest sovereign wealth fund on earth. Both were acts of people saying "this belongs to us, and we deserve a return on its extraction."
This is also true for the first commercially exploited natural gas fields in the world, in the Netherlands. This ruined the Dutch manufacturing industry, and became a textbook example of tge development of one sector harming others known as Dutch disease [].
This is a great point. The Netherlands is the cautionary tale of what happens when you don't do what Alaska and Norway did. A massive resource boom without proper public management hollowed out the rest of the economy.
If a handful of companies capture most of the value from AI while it simultaneously displaces workers across every other sector, that's Dutch disease applied to the entire knowledge economy. One sector booms, everything else withers.
I understand most cultures over-appreciate meat, but treating a premium carb source like rice lowly is a surprise.
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