Anduril sells missiles like the Barracuda-M (1/10 the warhead of a Tomahawk missile, and reduced range) for north of $200k. Very similar payload delivery price, that isn't actually a cheaper alternative. Arguably many targets don't require a 500kg warhead and in those cases a much smaller and cheaper missile would do the trick just fine, and if it can be produced much faster and benefit from economy of scale, even better, but at the end of the day they're just as much looking to make as much profit as possible as everyone else (everything for the shareholders).
Prices will come down if there's more competition and the contract awards are distributed better across the board. Like right now Boeing got the contract for BOTH of the 6th Gen fighters for the Navy and Air Force.
US military procurement regulations keep companies like GlobalFoundries alive. No alternative for critical chips from some of their legacy nodes (at least none that can be certified within years, obviously the chips themselves are very far from cutting edge).
I don't think that is really true any more. All electronics includes a substantial amount of Chinese sourced inputs but I believed actual manufacturing is taking place on Ukranian soil of metal and plastic parts. Of small jet engines as well.
Memory demand over time naturally goes up, so even an overcommitment wouldn't last longer than a few years until demand catches up again. SK and Samsung memory margins are utterly ridiculous currently (> 80%).
For September:
> In IT, semiconductor exports rose 262.8 percent to $60.30 billion, exceeding $60.0 billion for the first time as memory demand continued to grow, with export volumes continuing to expand and contract prices maintaining their upward trend.
Would such a thing even be covered by insurance? Or is it negligence for using a product after it might turn into an unstable bomb at any time?
On the other hand, wild that it doesn't revert to some sort of offline backup mode after warranty ends. Or that anyone bought it in the first place (that can't be standard in the industry, right?).
Even the cleanest bombs (97%+ fusion rather than fission) turned out to be too dirty for basically everything civilian (unlocking gas reservoirs - too radioactive; landscaping to replace enormous amounts of conventional explosives - too radioactive).
It's mostly about the distance, isn't it? Iirc even with the most modern ultra high voltage lines, it's about 3% per 1000km. Which honestly doesn't sound too bad, even for really long distances (like solar power from some desert to where people actually live).
Distance is a factor. I do not know what they were measuring (the main power plant was about 1000km away, but I don't know if they counted that or if that was ignored because someone else owned those lines). They were a fairly rural utility with most of the area belonging to farmers (but they do have a couple suburbs and a few small towns).
I don't know the real details, but my educated guess is they raised the voltage, and also they used 3x as many wires (running 3 phase past every house even though almost everybody only used 1 phase). That is I can visually see their insulators on the power posts are larger than neighboring utilities which allows for higher voltage (but may or may not mean higher voltages were used). Likewise I can see the 3 lines on each power pole while neighboring utilities only used one. It is hard to tell from the ground but I suspect they used thicker wires as well.
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