Moore’s Law Lives: the Future Is Still Alive
In a week of big stories, the biggest didn’t take place in Pakistan or Washington, D.C., but in Santa Clara, California. Unlike Osama bin Laden, we managed to dodge a bullet. If we hadn’t, it wouldn’t have ended modern civilization, but it might have sent it off on a much different, and much less happy, path.
You probably didn’t read this story. So, put simply, Intel Corp. announced Wednesday that Moore’s Law isn’t going to end anytime soon. Because of that, your life and the lives of your children and grandchildren are going to be a whole lot better than they might have been.
Today, almost a half-century after it was first elucidated by legendary Fairchild and Intel co-founder Dr. Gordon Moore in an article for a trade magazine, it is increasingly apparent that Moore’s Law is the defining measure of the modern world. All other predictive tool for understanding life in the developed world since WWII — demographics, productivity tables, literacy rates, econometrics, the cycles of history, Marxist analysis, and on and on — have failed to predict the trajectory of society over the decades … except Moore’s Law.
Alone, this oddly narrow and technical dictum — that the power, miniaturization, size, and power of integrated circuit chips will, together, double every couple years — has done a better job than any other in determining the pace of daily life, the ups and downs of the economy, the pace of innovation, and the creation of new companies, fads, and lifestyles. It has been said many times that, beneath everything, Moore’s Law is ticking away as the metronome, the heartbeat, of the modern world.
Why this should be so is somewhat complicated. But a simple explanation is that Moore’s Law isn’t strictly a scientific law — like, say, Newton’s Laws of Motion — but rather a brilliant observation of an implied contract between the semiconductor industry and the society it serves. What Gordon Moore observed back in the mid-1960s was that each generation of memory chips (in those days they could store a few thousand bits, compared to a few billion today), which appeared about every 18 months, had twice the storage capacity of the generation before. Plotting the exponential curve of this development on logarithmic paper, Moore was pleased to see a straight line … suggesting that this developmental path might continue into the foreseeable future.
This discovery has been rightly celebrated for years. But often forgotten is that there was technological determinism behind the Law. Computer chips didn’t make themselves. And so, if the semiconductor industry had decided the next day to slow production or reduce their R&D budgets, Moore’s Law would have died within weeks. Instead, semiconductor companies around the world, big and small, and not least because of their respect for Gordon Moore, set out to uphold the Law — and they have done so ever since, despite seemingly impossible technical and scientific obstacles. Gordon Moore not only discovered Moore’s Law, he made it real. As his successor at Intel, Paul Otellini, once told me, “I’m not going to be the guy whose legacy is that Moore’s Law died on his watch.” And that’s true for every worker in the semiconductor industry. They are our equivalent of medieval workers, devoting their entire careers to building a cathedral whose end they will never see.
And so, instead of fading away like yet one more corporate five-year plan, Moore’s Law has defined our age, and done so more than any of the more celebrated trend-setters, from the Woodstock generation to NASA to the personal computer. Moore’s Law today isn’t just microprocessors and memory, but the Internet, cellular telelphony, bioengineering, medicine, education, and play. If, in the years ahead, we reach that Singularity of man and computer that Ray Kurzweill predicts for us, that will be Moore’s Law too. But most of all, the virtuous cycle of constant innovation and advancement, of hot new companies that regularly refresh our economy, and of a world characterized by continuous change — in other words, the world that was created for the first time in history only about sixty years ago, and from which we can hardly imagine another — is the result of Moore’s Law.
Truly interesting article, long live Moore’s Law.
Marx` theory of proletarian revolution was built on the asumption of the numerical grouth of industrial production( and the weak influence of innovations).All numerical grouth processes in reality finish with the kind of the explosion and the qualitative change.Let`s whait for Moore`s explosion.
Could you rephrase that in a language that is understandable?
Groucho or Harpo? Those are the only two Marxists that are relevant these days.
Are you arguing from Marx, or from Malthus?
What’s “Moore’s Law” say about looking out your window at teeming shanty towns producing pirate Intel boards while playing with your Dick Tracy wristwatch?
It says that the residents of those shanty towns have a life expectancy twice what they did a generation ago along with more leisure time and luxuries.
And that if the view bothers you so much so you should move.
Let me guess: mmmmmmmmm, Mexico?
At least there won’t be any Al Aqsa Institutes.
The residents of that Shantytown are also using cellphones to set up small businesses, communicate with buyers arrange for deliveries – raising the general standard of living for everyone
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_39/b4051054.htm
A shanty town is born of desperation and societal decay – it is not a mechanism I would use to describe upward mobility.
Of course you wouldn’t – you’re already where those people are trying to be.
The “Shanty town” as you call it, has been the norm of human civilization for millions of years…one step up from out and out starvation, a primary concern for the previous BILLIONS of years…
Its wasnt untill the sucess of capitalism that millions of average people could move to into the comfortable suburbs….
Just so they can complain about how they got there.
In a nutshell, innovation across all lines of production will continue to accelerate at speeds even greater than over the last fifty years. I for one would have not thought that possible, but then again when I was first working with the products of Moore’s Law some forty years ago I was gobsmacked at the things my scientist friends were telling me would soon be possible. Digital music indeed.
I formally and publically predict that in 75 years the average American household will have 75 high-tech communication devices and the average American vocabulary will be 75 words, excluding variations on the infamous F-word. Since I’m struggling to survive 70 years of bad habits, my reputation for prophecy is in the hands of the youngest readers of this post.
When I first began working in what we now euphemistically call “High-Tech,” the most capable computer available to me was a DEC PDP-8 – the size of a washing machine, with very limited capabilities. I troubleshot and repaired devices that still used vacuum tubes.
Today, an iPod is more powerful than that.
Wow.
….And if it screws up, ITS CHEAPER TO JUST THROW IT AWAY than fix it.
And the PDP-11 was two washing machines, stacked one upon the other.
“Intel claims that more than 6 million of these 22 nanometer Tri-Gate transistors can fit in the period at the end of this sentence.”
I had to biggerize the font to see the period on my monitor – which makes me wonder how big the period was when you wrote this. But not to worry, the next period will be only half the size.
Isn’t it amazing you can get 22nm feature sizes in 3D using light?
While this is an interesting article, the idea that logrythmically expanding options for digital advancement means our grandkids will have a better life is still pretty much just a dream. For over two hundred years the dream of a government founded on the consent of the governed has been in existence yet the politicians cannot seem to spread that around the earth. If only ONE country per year had been forced to accept the First Amendment then true freedom might be washing across the globe. As it is, the digital ability to track every mile we drive, every phonecall we make, and every digital emission we generate grows faster and faster in a world where tyranny is the majority model. We can only hope…or have we learned any lessons recently?
Perfect point.
The inevitable result of advanced technology is always a “Bigger Brother”
They cant stop themselves….if EVERYONE has EZ Pass for tolls, time and location (and therefore speed and distance) are known factors as a matter of course…..it will take an impossible amount of “governmental willpower” to resist a speeding ticket revenue stream based on calculating data they already have.
With all the private (retail store/bank) security cameras out there, (that they already instantly turn to whenver there is a crime, just in case it captured something) why WOULDNT they eventually want to control and/or view all the feeds in real time?
If you have the technology to see through walls, and only your concience to stop you, walls are no longer going to be walls.
The government will then regard “lead shielding” in your house the way some states regard tinted windows on your car.
“If you have nothing to hide, Mr. Jones…”
America had the only real revolution.
All of the others merely replaced one set of commissars with another. That’s what the invariable outcome of revolution has been for the hundreds or thousands of examples in histroy. When George Washington walked away from the presidency, it was an unparalled moment in human history. Words can’t describe the importance of that act. The people in other countries aren’t free, they are as free as their ruling classes permit.
America insn’t perfect either, but it has been a lot closer to the vision of freedom than any other. Here, for this brief window in time, we were free to challenge the ruling class and live to tell of it. The only way that has ever happened anywhere else is at the point of a sword.
The outcome was so obvious that the 95% developed an envy of the 5% so great that they had to defeat the upstart country. So they suberted it; they constructed a universe of lies, a magic curtain in front of the stage that only shows the bad, and not the ten times greater good, so the good could be destroyed and the ruling classes could once again get their boots firmly planted on the unwashed necks.
proreason,
Brilliant! Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.
A man like George Washington would be sickened by what our government has devolved into.
“When small men cast long shadows, it’s a sign that the sun is going down.”
“In fact, the bottom line is that, historically, the problems that technology has addressed have gotten solved, and the ones that were dependent on politics and so forth have not.”
J. Storrs Hall
M&M: Murphy’s Law is still at it, as well.
I’m going to throw some cold water here. When I read the title I thought, Oh boy, I can throw away my survivalist books . Technological advance will somehow change human nature! But no such luck. Nothing new at all. Evil people can also use computers and learn how to fly airplanes. Kids were healthier when they didn’t watch TV and play video games. There were far less drugs and subsequent dependency when there were less drugs. People were more “erect” and wise in the days of high mortality, honor and shame. Why do Americans equate technological advance with a similar increase in wisdom? Pride, envy, lust, greed, anger, sloth, and gluttony are still very much with us and will be to the end of time. If anything, people have become more brutish, dull, and corrupt since the mid-60s.
Compare the quality of our politicians. Mid-60s, Lyndon Johnson, ex-school teacher escalated the country into Viet Nam war and accelerated the hippie movement beyond SDS’s wildest dreams. But at least he knew communism was the enemy. Islam wasn’t even on the radar screen. Our borders were secure. Now: a diversity shaman who is an actual product of SDS – and has no trouble taking other people’s money to pay off identity groups who have learned to vote themselves something for nothing. He’s so ignorant of our history he thinks Muslims made vast contributions to our culture and views the middle class as a far greater threat. We are trillions of dollars in debt but he can only think of more spending euphemistically called “investment.” Speaking of which, our language has become so debased with therapeutic innuendo, ghetto slang, and deconstruction that its hard to parse a typical sentence he reads from a script to get the real meaning, if there is one. At least Johnson spoke in a straight forward, manly way.
It seems that our technology is evolving expodentially while humankind over the last 30 thousand years evolves linearly at nearly a flat line.
One is led into “science fiction” in questioning as to who serves whom. Will artificial intelligence be kind to us?
Where in the world did you get the idea that humans have evolved?
In the beginning humans routinely used rocks to beat others into submission. Since then we’ve developed better rocks.
Other than that humans have not really changed.
the constant in moore’s law is a free market economy
there will be little innovation if the statists get their way
Agreed. If central planners had their way, the 80486 processor would surely be fast enough. That inovation money needs to go to the poor. And the Internet? well, anyone remember France’s Mintel? That’s the Internet as devised by central planning.
Moore’s law might be ticking away, but so is the debt clock, and Mr. Malone is looking at things in a tiny vacuum with the very arrogant assumption that “human ingenuity knows no bounds, nor can ever really be stopped.” Prove that one, will you (and no, you can’t have a $2 billion stimulus research grant). With a 14 trillion dollar debt and the government showing no signs of reining in spending, Moore’s law will become irrelevant because the products will only benefit a few, that is, if they are allowed to go into production by the central planners.
At the end of the day – the debt can burn – the bits get erased – obligations defaulted. And the chips will still be there. And as long as people want them they will get produced. All the rest is an accounting detail.
WOW !
Thank you for this important piece of info !
THIS is what the Free World is busy with, while the barbarians, foreign and domestic, try to bring us back to the dark ages, to poverty, to despair.
I guess you could give credit to human ingenuity. After all, paper followed clay tablets by a few thousand years, and the printing press followed a few thousand years after that.
Or you could credit the big ass boots in the rear of human ingenuity … economic freedom and free markets.
Of course, marxists, the modern-day pharoes of old, like it better when things only change every thousand years or so. It’s easier to clamp down on the rubes that way. And when the commissars control 99.9% of the wealth of the world, slowing down Moore’s law from 2 to 2,000 years isn’t really something they worry much about.
“you could credit the big ass boots in the rear of human ingenuity … economic freedom and free markets”
Dont forget pain old necessity like
“no work, no eat”
Also, theres a reason why colder climate civilizations (northern europe) are more technologically advanced than hotter places like Africa….
“Better SUSTAIN that fire, or your’ll be dead by morning”
Plan ahead, or youre dead.
Not quite such an imperitive to tinker in warm grasslands.
Yawn, take nap, have your buddy watch out for the lions….
Barefoot, loincloth, pointed stick…plenty of “technology” for that area, even today.
And Quantum computing will make tomorrow’s 3D computer look like a poorly constructed abacus.
If you can ever get one to work.
Yes, and lets not forget the need for efficient PRODUCTIVITY…
Absolutely IMPOSSIBLE in my company, with the continuous “upgrades” to everything we use.
I get LESS DONE now than 3-5 years ago, because we are perpetually tied to I.T. re-configuring, re-booting, upgrading, and re-training instead of WORKING.
Faster changes to software for 99% of my workforce means more time chasing your TAIL instead of DOLLARS.
“Moore’s law will become irrelevant because the products will only benefit a few…”
Perhaps you can sell this concept to the millions who today are carrying around what yesterday we would have called a supercomputer.
You could use the method we “central planners” use to communicate our Master Plan, except that we have yet to allow Twitter “to go into production”.
Oh, wait…..
But what have our personal supercomputers bought us really? Oh, no doubt we are more informed and more productive. So informed that we might be better off when ignorance was bliss. I am more inundated with bad news than ever before, and societal anxiety has also increased exponentially in accordance. Silicon chips have increased in number, but so have anti-depressants.
We can talk to PJM folks, but not know our neighbors. We’ve got children that are professional in joystick or texting but can’t form a sentence or think critically. Medicine has made great leaps in treatment, but the human life expectancy was impacted far more by basic sanitation. We may exponentially increase our computing speed, while the far more important basics of food and fuel to power the humans and machinery making it all possible, are at great risk of become more scarce and/or less affordable.
I think it fascinating that in these last days, technical knowledge has increased greatly. Fool’s gold however to believe it will save us, as the human heart grows more cold and our judgments grow clouded.
You are right Tex,
The super SUPER computing will be at the pinnacle….pure science, research, business, and carees in those fields will be part of the wave… Cascading layers will make “average” workers more efficient…billing, distribution, planning, point of sale, entertainment…these will see “advancements”….but there are so many in the middle of the pyramid that will just say “so freaking what”
Come on, how MUCH more “High Definition” does Internet Porn really NEED to become?
How MUCH deliverablity and portability are we currently missing out on?
Will a lawn mower, weed whacker and leaf blower that runs on fuel cells, REALLY make my life THAT much better? I like doing my yard myself…I’ve gone through two spark plugs in ten years…a billion in R&D, and the advanced technology it creates will save me 5 minutes over a decade. Big whoop.
Sometimes, I dont WANT instant communication.
I dont WANT to be found, monitored, observed, tracked and “connected”.
Sometimes, having limitless choices takes the joy out of things.
Imagine defining EVERY possible element in your next restarant meal…no unknowns, no variables, no suprizes, anticipations or delights…Texture, spice, smell, moisture, chewiness, mouth-feel…key in the exact data and get EXACLTY what you programed. Enjoy your meal
Yeah, THAT would be interesting…
I have my fathers Dog-tags, and my Moms engagement ring.
An on-demand 3-D hologram, (5 times more vivid, and 10 times faster every week!) would add nothing to my memories of them.
A good book, and a phillips head screwdriver, are about as perfect as they’ll ever need to be, no matter how advanced computer chips become.
Failure of imagination time! A Philips head screwdriver, perfect? Do me a favour.
Nanotech offers the possibility to bond two objects together in such a way that one could never tell they had ever been apart. A bit better than a screwdriver, methinks.
I have a favourite story about computer power. About 30 years ago, I had the great privilege of playing with Cambridge University’s main research computer. It cost £16 million, its cooling system doubled as the heating for a 7-story building – and it had 256K of main mamory and 105MB of disk space. I believe its clock speed was about 1MHz.
My phone does better than that.
Christian,
Yup, I’ll bet your phone does…so does mine…
But I only USE my phone about 3 times a week.
Aside from storing numbers so I dont have to look them up and dial manually, its only slightly more useful than the old land line.
Its QUITE annoying to be “within reach 24/7/365″, so most of the time I simply turn mine off. And more often than not, when I DO wish to use it, the battery is DEAD.
My corporate parent company is into nano research, its facinating stuff…
But MY clothes still have buttons and zippers…developling nano-bonding openings to create “pure seamlessness” to keep out THAT much more cold air drafts, when my “exposure” to the elements daily is front door to car, and car to office, its a bit of useless overkill for me to want or care….
Space travellers? Other top pinnacle careers and uses?
Maybe. But nothing the great middle of the pyramid will ever really need.
I wear a 125 year old Waxed Canvas design by Filson when I hunt in inclement weather. Sometimes a wool sweater underneath, if its very cold. Water proof, silent, briar proof, and it lasts FOEREVER…nothing “modern” I’ve tried comes close.
High technology things require High technology to service…
A $35-50K SUV/automobile with back-up cameras, heated mirrors, headrest DVD players and airbags everywhere quickly becomes an unwanted liability, once its “like new” nearly maintenence free life cycle is over. (80-100k miles)
But at that point its “used car” price is prohibitvely expensive to those in the “used car” market…they are sitting, lease turn-ins, row upon row in EVERY dealership in my area. They go nowhere, because no one wants them…no one has that much cash (20-25k) for a USED car, and no one wants to borrow for 5 years on a vehicle with 100K on the odometer, and god knows what level of expensive “systems and sensors” to maitain beyond the traditional powertrain.
One last example….Military “goretex” breathabe fabrics. Enourmously expensive to design and produce. I spent months testing the “Moisture/vapor Transmition Rates” and “Color Spectography Shade Variations” of the camo print after exposure to things like weapons oil and diesel fuel to get a product appproved and into the “procurement system”…Cant have the enemy detect the slightest BLUE tint in the GREEN, now, can we?
In the time frame of a testing cycle, Hamas killed off Fattah, and took over in Gaza in a bloddy coup…all while wearing a lot simple, home made BLACK HOODS. Probably not “breatheable”, and probably not “standard deviation shade variation below 2 sigma” but they DID have one advantage…
They WORKED.
Like a Phillips screwdriver.
Good points. A question I’ve asked before: How much does it cost the United States to kill one Taliban fighter? How much does it cost a Taliban fighter to kill one American soldier?
I don’t care what you say, I’d still trade all this computer nonsense for a flying car and a raygun.
Cambrige got taken. Computers broke the 1 GFLOP level nearly thirty five years ago. $16 million shoud have gotten you that computer over forty years ago. Still replaceing a 1989 $90,000 computer with a $500 dollar computer brings home the reality of Moore’s Law.
I won’t be satisfied until I can download porn to holodeck in my house! Let the technology wave continue!
Ah, yes, progress…
But I’ve always believed that 99% of guys on Viagra dont REALLY need it…
What they need is a “one-twenty”
You know, something One hunderd pounds, and Twenty years old?
THAT my friend, is the oldest story there is!
Did anyone happen to notice where the first factory that Intel President Paul Otellini said would produce these chips is located?
I’ve always been partial to Cole’s Law.
LOL!!
11!
“But what have our personal supercomputers bought us really? Oh, no doubt we are more informed and more productive. So informed that we might be better off when ignorance was bliss. I am more inundated with bad news than ever before, and societal anxiety has also increased exponentially in accordance. Silicon chips have increased in number, but so have anti-depressants.”
That’s not a problem with technology, it’s just a problem with society not having caught up.
And personally, I’m not of the opinion that *more* knowledge is bad and that ignorance is good. That’s the philosophy of people who think happiness is just a matter of shelter and calories, i.e. totalitarian regimes. “News? But comrade, didn’t you get enough food stamps this week?”
And to a large extent, technology has made people *less* isolated than before. If you live in a small community and have an eccentric hobby, the internet is one of the few ways to find and interact with people just like you. I was a kid who loved model airplanes and flyfishing and history books–and it was all stuff I engaged alone because it was pretty much impossible to find anyone my age who liked those things. So thank god for the internet; hopefully there are kids out there following their passions and using the internet to find others with similar interests.
More knowledge is good – if it is the right knowledge. Board scores in medicine and ACT scores are in decline.
Is that why we we’re having an epidemic of teenage suicides in the most technical of countries? Because they don’t have “enough” technology? Totalitarian regimes?
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more. Rudyard Kipling
Harry Harrison included the critical insight on technological advance
in a story called ‘The Ethical Engineer’ published in Analog SF magazine
back in 1964; As the percentage of educated individuals essential to the
functioning of a society increases, repression becomes more difficult,
and can bring down a repressive regime, as happened back in the USSR.
I am not referring to the tiny minority of chip architecture specialists,
but to everyone who operates one of the devices powered by their products,
which is to say, pretty much everybody these days.
Pushing buttons after reading 1/10 of a manual is not a sign of education. Worse, people all over the world who can’t read use cellphones.
As I read that article while reading back issues of Analog in High School It is nice to see the echos of John W Campbell the editor of Analog still going. I often wish that there was distribution by an editor who had a PhD in Nuclear Physics today.
Many of us came of Internet age watching processor speeds increase at the rate of Moore’s law, along with storage and memory availability.
Suddenly, processor speeds stopped increasing altogether, and geeks were left to overclock because processor speed seemed to have left Moore’s jurisdiction.
That’s still the case.
Meanwhile, Moore’s law has a corollary on the demand side: applications and systems that are sloppily designed will REQUIRE an exponentially growing supply of memory and storage.
Forget quantitative measures. Qualitatively speaking, we still SPIN OUR STORAGE DEVICES USING MOTORS.
That’s insane.
And SSDs have a write limit.
That’s just sad.
As for Intel, maybe they should apply some basic laws of performance — never mind Moore’s — to their integrated video controllers for commodity grade consumer machines. They’re making a buck, but the ostensible gains they tout as potentially “ours” end up being nobody’s in the long run.
The way I explain Moore’s law to those outside semiconductors is:
“You can solve any (semiconductor) problem by hosing is down with engineers and money”.
I remember hearing a talk around 1995 claiming silicon would be dead by 2000 and everything would be built on GaAs. Sure, a small fraction of devices are built on GaAs, but Si is still very alive and kicking thanks to Moore’s Law.
Its a matter of utility , material cost effectiveness, and need. Some things can be made, and sold to satisfied customers forever, with no need to evolve very much further.
I used the example of a Phillips head screwdriver earlier.
How much more “advanvced” can a hand held screwdriver get.
I’m putting a new roof on my house…
Prybar, made of metal, see: Ancient Archemedies…
Electric circular saw, at least a 20-30 year old design…
Ditto form my drill. (no battery packs to run out)
A level, whats that, a thousand year old design?
Blue Jeans.
Leather Shoes.
A decent Side by Side 12 gauge bird gun.
2 x 4 lumber
Wine glasses
A Hacksaw
Desirable commodities that serve a useful purpose dont need alot of “advancement”, as long as they stay useful, and affordable.
A lot of computer software is like that too.
Really.
Moore’s law is the answer that proved the malthusians and the marxists wrong. Malthusians and marxists both assumed that population would grow geometrically (ie, doubling ever so many years), while production would only increase linearly (at a steady fixed rate), thus leading to eventual mass poverty and starvation.
But Moores law says that innovation and productivity, at least with computer processing power, also increases geometrically, and thus can help production keep up with population growth. The agricultural productivity revolution has also grown geometrically, another answer to Malthus, as have many other things dependent on technology.
But the key is these kinds of geometric productivity growth can only occur in a free capitalist economic system, that encourages innovation, instead of regulating it do death, or allowing the powerful to steal the rewards from the innovators. Systems that do not allow such economic freedom, will indeed suffer from malthusian starvation, as we see in socialist and failed states.
Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus got everything he touched wrong including Britain’s Corn Laws that he favored and caused the Irish famine. But liberal Irish descendants of the survivors of those Laws still follow his green model from 1830 that supports controlled starvation and the other Green programs. With such great men over the last three centuries why do we have to constantly fight back the junk science of men who never succeeded like Malthus, Marx, and Keynes?
See “The Approaching Singularity”, “The Coming Convergence”, or “Engines of Creation”
So does this mean my pRon will download faster or that I will be able to interact with it in a real virtual manner? Will I need hardwired implants? As Glenn Reynolds says, faster please!///
The Futurist is way ahead of you.
Read a far more detailed article written back in 2009.
Um . . .you do know that I’ve been writing about Moore’s Law longer than anyone alive, don’t you? I wrote the first daily newspaper article on Gordon and his law in 1979, the first mainstream magazine article in about 1983, was the first person to interview Moore about it on TV in 1988, and was the first to describe the Law in a theatrical film in 2009. I think that about covers it.
Google is your friend . . .
Moore’s Law is on a collision course with More Laws. In the 1960s the Federal Register of new laws and rules averaged 17,000 pages a year. Although it hasn’t been doubling every 18 months, it averaged 73,000 pages a year in the 2000s and will be over 80,000 pages this year.
Last week there was an article about how the new laws and rules have affected the evolution of washing machines: because of mandates about water usage, power usage, and detergent usage, washing machines today are less competent than they were ten years ago.
This is exactly the case: A couple of years ago and being in the market for a new washing machine, I checked some consumer tests. Astonishingly, none of the machines listed got top marks for – washing. Especially rinsing was dire, due to reduced water consumption. Which leads to manually adding cycles to the process, thus consuming more electricity. A brilliant saving.
The future will be brighter but will the United States with the highest business taxes in the world share it? Regulations also have to be counted in the tax burden for economic purposes. I just don’t see America throwing off the oppression of our regulators in the next ten years. We just can not kill all of the Government employees that need killing.
We think of Spain as the sleepy slightly backward country that it was when Franco finally died. We do not think of it as the most dynamic country in the world for two centuries. But the 1492 discovery of America was a project of exploration by a royal couples who had already thrown the Muslims out of Europe and were building Spain into the most powerful trading nation on earth for the next two centuries. Enough Government jobs dragged them down.
The United States could be a looted husk in twenty years and many more African refugees.