A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates
wsj.comFrom TFA:
> By 2025, she foresees demand for around 185 million square feet of advanced substrate manufacturing space against about 145 million square feet built.
It's curious that the production capacity for substrate is expressed in terms of manufacturing space. Is that an industry-specific quirk?
I work in a somewhat related industry and have definitely heard people talk in these terms. I think it's partly because a large percentage of the cost of this sort of manufacturing is embodied in facilities costs, which scale roughly-linearly with area. Because the facilities costs are high, manufacturing is therefore packed in at the maximum possible density, which means that the production capacity ALSO scales roughly-linearly with area.
Bear in mind that actual productive output, or how much a factory cost is quite possibly not public knowledge. But area is (just look at google maps). If you're an insider with some of these ballpark area ratios in your head, you can easily come to some conclusions.
I've likewise heard people talk about building particle accelerators in terms of cost-per-meter. In particular: ballparking the cost of a synchrotron light source as a million USD per meter.
"On one occasion, as Master Foo was traveling to a conference with a few of his senior disciples, he was accosted by a hardware designer.
The hardware designer said: “It is rumored that you are a great programmer. How many lines of code do you write per year?”
Master Foo replied with a question: “How many square inches of silicon do you lay out per year?”
“Why...we hardware designers never measure our work in that way,” the man said.
“And why not?” Master Foo inquired.
“If we did so,” the hardware designer replied, “we would be tempted to design chips so large that they cannot be fabricated - and, if they were fabricated, their overwhelming complexity would make it be impossible to generate proper test vectors for them.”
Master Foo smiled, and bowed to the hardware designer.
In that moment, the hardware designer achieved enlightenment."
- Master Foo and the Hardware Designer: http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/index.html
Seems reasonable, semi is fabbed with a lithographic process, the # of devices on the wafer isn’t necessarily tightly coupled with size, has variable resolution and defects.
The work unit is completed wafers that later get binned into different device quality levels.
Makes sense when your biz is to blast plasma over mm2 of silicon
What you're saying seems to make sense if they were referring to output in terms of total area of substrates produced, but instead sounds like TFA is talking about manufacturing floor space
You're right, I didn't pick up on that, thank you.
> sounds like TFA is talking about manufacturing floor space
Does it really? I for one certainly did a double-take at the GP's interpretation. It's a product that's usually measured in surface area, and was reported in surface area. Feels pretty obviously related to the product itself, not the factory floor.
>Now major chip companies are resorting to unusual tactics. They are placing orders far in advance and prepaying so that substrate companies have ample cash to build more factories. Some are committing to buying the entire supply of new production lines to give their suppliers confidence to invest.
If the chip makers are investing this much money into the substrate businesses, why aren't they just purchasing some of these companies wholesale?
The chip companies also know that they will definitely buy electricity in the future, yet they are not buying power plants.
In a sense, buying the future substrate production is just a future substrate contract.
Do you know how building a power plant is financed today? Basically someone buys 10 years of gas futures, sells 10 years of equivalent electricity futures, and uses the profit (since electricity is more expensive than gas) to build the power plant that will turn the bought gas into the sold electricity.
I suppose they could also just sell the electricity futures first, then build the plant, then buy gas as needed. That'd put them at risk of gas prices fluctuating though, might turn off investors.
I assume a random person can't just sell 10 years of electricity futures without some kind of collateral.
> I assume a random person can't just sell 10 years of electricity futures without some kind of collateral.
Maybe they run the negotiations in parallel, so they can kind of use one set of futures as collateral for the other?
Any source, extra info or further insight on that last bit?
Comes to mind: "Be the change you want to see in the world, and get paid for it"
It costs over $5 billion dollars to build a single fab. I can only assume the more complicated chips costs 3-4 times more.
It also takes over three years to build the plant itself. We aren't even talking about the people you'd even need to employ, design, and run the place (highly specialized labor).
This is such a huge burdensome cost. It's not even a guarantee that that such an investment would even make sense once 5-years pass.
I do think there should be more fabs and having them located in one area of the world is already playing out to be a geopolitical nightmare. It's obviously going to become a national security issue for nearly every industrialized country on earth over the next decade if not sooner.
In the article it says they are committing to buying the entire production lines output. Isn't that just committing to spending as much money as building the factories + the profit of the vendor, but with no control over the actual production ?
It’s very unlikely that the deal says “we will buy everything you sell us no matter what.” It’s probably a typical purchasing agreement with tolerances and QA, just paid in advance.
Thus there is still a lot of risk being taken on by the fabs. The production could go sour, geopolitics could change, resources might be unavailable, etc.
The purchasing companies are externalizing all of this risk by purchasing the products instead of the company.
The chip companies probably have forms of insurance in place to cover losses if their independent supply chain partners fail to deliver that they wouldn't be able to get if the partners were integrated.
ah, that was the part I did not understand
Buying a company is much more expensive than paying for a manufacturing line.
The margin isn't high enough on substrates to make buying and maintaining the process worth it.
It’s strange that this happened. Did COVID just cause everyone to stop investing for a bit, leading to all these downstream problems? Or was this gonna happen anyway?
Let's say that all Banana growers were shut down for 8 months and during that time all existing supply was bought up that were sitting on store shelves. After they were allowed to start growing again, how long until you see a Banana in your local store? You better be there when they arrive, because everyone else who has been wanting Bananas is waiting too.
On top of that, can the Banana grower even get all of the items needed to grow the same sized crop as last year? All of the fertilizers, etc.? Those companies have been shut down during this time too. Oh, you're not the only company who needs those exact same supplies and the Potato farmer down the road is trying to purchase it too? After you've grimaced that the price has risen due to short supply and you had to source the items from 3x as many suppliers as you used to, now, you're relieved that your Bananas are almost done growing. You call the trucking company to deliver them to the distributor, who you learn is short staffed and prices have risen in order to attract truckers who are now in short supply, and factor in the gas price increases. Every single segment of the economy that the Banana grower relied on is going through the same thing, at the same time.
Making chips is several orders of magnitude harder/more complex than growing Bananas. Think about how many different companies products must be purchased to make a wafer. How many different highly specialized chemicals are used in addition to solid materials? If any single one of them is having supply or labor issues...
I don't think it's that the fabs were shut down because of covid, but rather because automotive manufacturers (and presumably others) forecasted record low sales for 2020 and canceled all of their chip orders such that chip suppliers and upstream fabs had to lay off staff and so on. As I understand it, this was what reduced fab capacity, not "fabs were closing to avoid the risk of covid".
On the flip side, rather than demand decreasing as auto manufacturers expected, it actually spiked, and automotive manufacturers demanded more chips and were willing to pay $$$ for it. So other industries that use chips and accurately forecasted their demand were now bidding against automotive manufacturers for that fab capacity.
Auto makers and others are part of the problems with forecasted demand, but there are also larger supply chain issues. Basically every part of the industry, going back to raw materials, is having similar shortages; either because people shut down for COVID or because they, too, underestimated demand during the pandemic.
I suspect it has a lot more to do with failing to properly forecast in general, whether overestimation or underestimation. Supply chains are finely tuned for life as usual and they take a long time to recalibrate.
Also imagine that there are no truck drivers to drive the bananas from the plantations to your local stores, and no ships to bring fertilizer to the banana plantations. Even when they start growing again, it's going to be a while before you can get one.
Supply chains in general are in shambles. We had mass COVID outbreaks at the ports that shut down unloading, as well as outbreaks at see. Truck drivers are quitting because it ain't worth their while anymore. Countries closed their borders. Patterns of consumer demand changed, so all the containers got stuck in North America.
Chips are the most obvious manifestation of this because the supply chains for them are long and complex, but we're going to see it in many other products as well once inventory buffers run out.
> Also imagine that there are no truck drivers to drive the bananas from the plantations to your local stores, and no ships to bring fertilizer to the banana plantations.
In the UK, the situation is even worse: because there is an acute shortage of truckers to truck pigs from farms to slaughterhouses and a lack of butchers, 100k pigs are set to be killed and burned - they simply grow each day, and butchers have limits on how big/heavy the pigs may be: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9958663/Farms-set-k...
Turns out, no one but immigrants wanting to send or set aside money for their home country wants to do the job for the wage the companies are paying. And companies can't pay better wages because customers are conditioned on cheap meat. And politicians haven't done anything to curb that because tolerating rising food prices is one of the fastest ways of not getting reelected.
Brexit really hit at the worst possible time, and now innocent pigs have to suffer for society's failures. What a damn tragic waste.
> now innocent pigs have to suffer for society's failures.
They were going to be killed no matter what. I don't think it matters much to the pig what happens after it's dead.
It should matter to us when the inevitable killing of the animal (along with the environmental harm incurred by raising it) take place without any benefit to us. Our society has decided those terrible costs are worth it in exchange for bacon and hot dogs. When these animals are raised and wasted they'll have suffered for nothing and the rest of us will suffer for it.
Yes but it's a huge waste of resources that only the farmer is paying for. They paid to house, feed, innoculate, etc those pigs. Killing them to burn them realizes no profit for them.
Although we are conducting a perverted form of nature, there is nothing wrong with eating animals. The problem is the poor treatment of the animals and eating too much meat in general.
When you abuse animals for nothing then you are basically killing for sport.
I don't agree. If humans needed to eat animals to survive then it might be reasonable to argue that killing animals for any reason other than food is wrong. Because then you could argue that you are inflicting the minimal possible amount of suffering.
But since humans don't need to eat animals, I don't see much difference ethnically between killing them because they taste good vs for no reason. If anything, that seems to be more about welfare of the human psyche than welfare of the animals.
> And companies can't pay better wages because customers are conditioned on cheap meat.
Are customers conditioned to cheap meat, or no meat? These customers surely live in a market economy, and understand that no matter how much they may bitch on Facebook, prices... Fluctuate..?
The reason nobody wants to raise wages during a labour shortage isn't because they are afraid of hiking prices. Prices hike up all the time. It's because they are afraid of being stuck with high wages after the labour shortage ends. Wages are stickier than prices, and are much more difficult to lower.
> Are customers conditioned to cheap meat, or no meat?
To cheap and always available meat. Throughout history, a rise in wealth has been closely correlated with a rise in meat consumption (as seen e.g. in China, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/may/30/food.chi...).
> These customers surely live in a market economy, and understand that no matter how much they may bitch on Facebook, prices... Fluctuate..?
And politicians are highly afraid of the public bitching on food prices. Revolutions have often begun with a public pissed off about food prices!
> It's because they are afraid of being stuck with high wages after the labour shortage ends.
The never ending history of "corporate whining": http://leftycartoons.com/2009/09/04/a-brief-history-of-corpo...
Chips are also obvious because they are a discrete thing that is at the end of one long supply chain and then beginning of other long supply chains.
Countries have closed their borders to casual travel, but not to shipping.
China, notably, closes ports to end outbreaks.
Let's say that all Banana growers were shut down for 8 months and during that time all existing supply was bought up that were sitting on store shelves.
-- But chip manufacturers didn't shut down. That's even close to the immediate cause, which was that the anticipation of changed future demand on the part of other manufacturers lead to them decreasing and change future orders. If you're going to ELI5("explain this to me like a five year old"), at least give some reasonably analogous situation, jeesh.
I mean, I think people understand that supply takes some time to catch up with demand when you have a complex, interdependent economy. But the adjustment to this shock has taken longer than seems reasonable or seems like happened in the past so more data than X has to adjust for Y which has to adjust for Z is appropriate.
Some fabs did shutdown this year. One in Japan due to a fire and some in Texas due to power loss. I think both are back up and running, but it did not help to lose production.
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2021/03/30/200...
https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/04/30/austin-f...
I'd expect these shutdowns to be more-or-less randomly distributed across calendar years[1], and in aggregate, accounted for, on a macro level, in supply/demand projections.
[1] The examples you cited suffer from confirmation bias - a plant shutting down due to a fire when there isn't already a chip shortage, would not really make the news. And if it did, you wouldn't be actively looking for it!
A closer analogy might be that all of the banana growers were told they should grow mangos, so the plowed under the banana trees and planted mangos.
Not that massively, but various plants had to shut down at various times, which really isn't helping matters. It's not just "misjudged demand", that would be relatively easy to fix or be limited to few sectors if everything otherwise ran at needed capacity.
Don't forget people panic buying extra bananas so they have inventory in case banana production shuts down again.
This is now the main problem.
I was contemplating the shortages the other night while sitting around a fire.
It hit me that the problem is the whole global system is now just one big Just-In-Time (JIT) system built from smaller JIT units of industry which is a collection of yet more JIT factories.
It's JIT all the way down!
And JIT doesn't work well when the spice isn't continuously flowing.
It's poorly implemented JIT. People simplified Just In Time to mena "no inventory" and then when a disruption hit, it echoed up and down supply chains. JIT doesn't mean no inventory, it means managing inventory and your supply chain to ensure adequate iventory based on needs both current and forseen.
One car example, you should ensure you have 4 times as many tires available as you do cars, because an imbalance there becomes either a constraint (too few tires) or a waste (too many tires). But it's not JUST making those numbers match, you have to forecast, how many cars and I going to build, are my supplies for the cars ok, look at normal fluctuations, and then also look at potential supply chain FAILURES and plan for them. Maybe it's easy to get brake pads but the lead time on tires is 4 months. Well then, I don't need to stock as many brake pads in case of a disruption, but I should definitely have enough tires to carry me through a potential disruption (maybe not 4 months worth, maybe I stock 2 and slow down car production, or something).
All these companies kept their shelves bare, and when some companies slowed orders, they didn't stop to think that the manufacturers they bought from would look for other customers to take up capacity. They acted like TSMC would sit there by the phone waiting for some customer to come back. No, they're in the business of selling chips, not in the business of servicing DumbCorp. No one planned for what might happen if they stopped ordering parts, they just expected the capacity to be there.
I'm bringing 6 new sites online this year, and a 7th early in the new year. I just bought a bunch of network equipment for not just our existing sites, but the 7 to come. I looked at supply chain issues, and said to my CFO, this inventory is going to sit here for 6 months, but we get a larger quantity discount, and we'll get the new sites online faster and not worry about getting this equipment if we buy now. We COULD have saved that money now, but the advantages of having it when we need it is greater than having that money in the bank for 6 more months.
JIT means planning ahead, not just micromanaging inventory. Too many MBAs don't get that.
Your description doesn’t sound too different (if at all) from the face mask/ventilator shortage at the start of the pandemic. We didn’t stock up, and everyone tried to JIT purchase the necessary equipment.
Maybe we all have something to learn from Doomsday preppers.
> Maybe we all have something to learn from Doomsday preppers.
A little, but really just implementing the Toyota Production System properly. You'll never be perfectly prepared for everything, but a lot of the mess over the past 18 months of supply chain problems could have been avoided. In my personal life, I am NOT a prepper, but the way I stock my house, I had no issues with toilet paper, meat, or other weird shortages. I look at what I have no, what I'll need adn when, and how things are going. I didn't look for TP when I was out, I looked for it a week or two ahead of time.
Didn't toyota pioneer the JIT system of logistics?
But as with most such systems, others only implemented it partially and thus in a way that in the end creates problems.
They looked at it and thought: "They cut 90% of the costs. We can do one better and cut 100%!"
Which works until it doesn't. When it does they look at it as having improved what already exists (The toyota model) when it doesn't they blame the original one instead of their mangled implementation ("agile" anyone?)
What I see as explanations of the chip shortage is a combination of factors.
One immediate cause was that some manufacturers reduced their chip orders month in advance since they expected less demand but then the demand didn't decrease and they had to scramble, increasing general demand. Another immediate cause was that Covid has made some production lines shutdown or become unreliable.
But the reason that now a year or more on, we have problems, seems require more explaining. Larger causes I've heard; The chip supply chain is extremely long, long enough so you get a whipsaw effect or anti-whipsaw effect. A whipsaw effect means by the time demand catches up with supply, it goes beyond it and manufacturers lose money. But what seems to be happening is an anti-whipsaw effect - suppliers are avoiding any panic measures to catch up with demand and so lose money but this means the catching up is a long process.
This is something of a product of a highly capital intensive economy pushing manufacturers to only produce, invest and consume in a narrow range. Limiting investment in capital equipment is a way to make the investment you make is 100% utilized. Limiting consumption to the lowest priced items is a way to make sure all of your production is profitable. It seems like a new phenomena. Instead of a "deflationary spiral" these factors pushed to their extreme could result in a "decreasing production spiral" where physical continually declines despite demand. We're not there yet, of course but it seems like an interesting economic phenomena.
Chip investment was already down-shifted in 2019 because it was a down year based on historical semiconductor cycles.
Then COVID triggered a collapse of nearly all JIT supply chains (not just medical). Try getting ANY industrial or consumer product - the supply chains are all broken right now. Some of this is China intentionally fxcking us. Some of it is over dependence on outsourcing. Most is due to inherent instability of JIT as a fundamental flaw that's long been ignored.
Many supply chains have both short and long feedback loops to themselves. For example ALL the equipment required to increase semiconductor capacity always require the very same semiconductor supply chain capacity (chip making requires chips being made).
The developer of the O.MG cable has a good Twitter thread describing the issues.
Unrolled thread:
This is a pretty good summary. Note on interpretation: it links to people expressing surprise about 12 months after the shit had hit the fan.
IMHO a strong mitigation strategy includes (1) have control of your designs (be responsive to your business environment) (2) minimize vendor-specific components (replace sexy ICs with stock-components where possible) (3) keep tested alternatives on the books for major components (redundant supply chain) (4) cache parts where necessary
IIRC, some industries did stop or slow investing, foreseeing a dip in the economy. The dip proved to be briefer than expected though, which is good, but left people scrambling for inventory.
The guy who runs my local bike shop is saying they still won't have enough bikes next year.
I just came back empty handed from bike shop trying to buy some spare tubes. No supply. I better not get too many flats!
If it's a MTB or gravel bike you may want to invest in a tubeless setup.
A tubless setup definitely requires some supplies as as well.
There's also the stimulus that injected demand into the system, so more goods may purchased than if COVID never happpened.
The main thing, particularly for ABF substrates, is that remote work drove PC volumes way higher than anyone thought.
It's a demand shock.
The archive.is link at the top no longer works. This one is currently working:
http://www.coppernews.io/2021/09/05/a-big-hurdle-to-fixing-t...
Has anybody ever considered that better software may be a part of the solution to the chip shortage? Going back to actually caring about things like efficiency and using the hardware properly instead of living in layers of software abstraction miles high? We put men on the moon with chips that could probably be manufactured in somebody's basement. We easily fulfill society's NEEDs with that level of hardware, we just need to give up streaming gigs of Netflix through our Electron apps to make it happen.
I'm not sure why you'd think software inefficiency has anything to do with it. It's not a significant factor driving demand for new hardware.
Demand for gaming PCs and consoles have nothing to do with inefficient software. Demand for automobiles has nothing to do with inefficient software. Demand for servers, networking equipment, and office PCs to support a suddenly-working-from-home labor force has nothing to do with inefficient software. Windows 11 not supporting 5-year-old hardware, crypto booms, and pathetically short support windows for smartphones have nothing to do with inefficient hardware.
My 6-year-old laptop and 5-year-old desktop handle Electron apps just fine. It would be nice if the software was more efficient, but practically nobody is rushing out to replace a computer that was any good to begin with because Discord and Skype take up an extra 50 MB.
Besides, making software more efficient is a long-term solution to a short-term problem.
Most chips are not processors running software and most of the manufactured processors are small embedded ones, i.e not the kind of processors running extremely bloated software applications
I am imagining the 'plastics!' scene from The Graduate, but with 'substrates!'.
Would smaller wafers help? They're thinner. I was surprised by the thickness of a 300mm wafer.
The reason you can't get a PS5 is because China is deliberately messing with the supply chain, because of Trump's mini-trade-war with them in 2017-2020, which they have not forgotten.
Lol every time I see the word "feet" I'm reminded that this article isn't targeted to anyone but Americans, even when talking about manufacturing lines in Asia. My East Asian bias is showing but in all my experience I absolutely have never had to use those units in a serious professional context. Any time I see a technically-sounding article use units like "feet" and "football fields" I subconsciously find it very difficult to take anything afterward seriously.
I admit it's irrational since units are arbitrary and orthogonal anyway, but it seems... forced. Is it really necessary to use those units in a technical context in order to relate to your readers?
EDIT: Lots of America-centric people are jumping onto me for this initial comment, stating that WSJ is built for its /true/ target audience, /Americans/. What sparked my comment was the fact I was reading this article in Japanese. The aforementioned numbers and graph are expressed in feet, so this kind of forced conversion across industry domain and language barrier seemed contrived and got me started on this train of thought.
https://jp.wsj.com/articles/the-chip-shortage-has-made-a-sta...
You started a hell of a flamewar with this, and you contributed to perpetuating it too. That's totally not cool here.
Please follow the site guidelines, which include:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28448249 and marked it off topic.
The difference between 185 million ft^2 and whatever you pick doesn't matter. It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number.
You have, and are probably using right now, a voice controlled computer that can convert anything to anything else, by just asking.
Is it really worth typing this every time an American site uses American language? We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha.
I think you might have missed that I already stated that it's an irrational thing to complain about because units in nature are arbitrary, but given that no one uses these units for the topic at hand, why use them at all? Just for relatability?
> It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number.
We're saying the same thing but arguing for the opposite. Like I said, no one in a technical capacity uses these units seriously. So then if the number is so conceptually massively big and the units don't matter, why go through the extra forced effort of converting to imperial? Just use the units that the specifications come in and the numbers that the factories use?
The more you play with vast unit conversions like this, the more you risk losing information across sources/citations. What if I want to do my own research later on? It's more work if I'm searching for specific numbers on Google. We also know just how terrible Google Search results are getting nowadays, so...
> We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha.
I think this is an uncharitable interpretation of my comment. I'm not trying to make fun of Americans, I'm trying to understand what the extra efort is worth for?
Yes, in short it's for relatability. You're talking about a general circulation newspaper -- and one of the very biggest at that.
At the end of the day, their customer is the general American news consumer, and what they read has to make sense to them.
A technical or industry-aware American probably won't go to WSJ first for their technical / industry news.
> why use them at all? Just for relatability?
Yes. Was that hard?
The WSJ didn't write this article for you, it isn't an industry rag. This is like complaining that their scientific articles try to dumb it down for a layman's depth.
A football field or soccer field is a perfectly reasonable unit of measure when you're simply trying to convey "a lot" to someone.
I don't particularly agree with the parent comment, but you are being oddly aggressive over something that is a real problem - communicating things is hard and it's a useful topic to consider in a world that increasingly runs on text-based communication.
Insulting and making fun of people because they have a problem isn't helpful but ok, but responding "aggressively" to insults is bad?
I don't see any insults or "making fun of people" in the comments you're responding to. You're choosing to see that.
Apply the Principle of good faith and you'll see you're the one getting worked up over nothing...
Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN, regardless of how badly someone else is behaving or you feel they are.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. They include:
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
I'm sorry you feel like I'm worked up but please don't put that on me.
I've linked to the OP's original comment but to paraphrase:
"LOL, I can't take anyone seriously when they use Imperial units. It's unprofessional."
Pedantically, at least a standard US football field is an exact size (120yds long, 53 1/3 yds wide).
Soccer pitches? Not so much ... FIFA states the field of play for international matches should be 100-110m long and 64-75m wide (tolerances are relaxed to 90-120m long by 45-90m wide - which oddly means you could have a square pitch). If one would like an example of a comically undersized pitch, look to NYFC playing at Yankee stadium - they had to get a special exemption from MLS, IIRC.
Still useful, though, and I think a reasonable person with familiarity with either soccer or football would get a rough idea.
Please don't take this as criticism ; it's not meant to be. The mention of football and soccer fields being used as a measure of size in the same sentence sparked recollection of some not-otherwise-useful knowledge stuck in my brain.
I don't think anyone uses them as exact units of measure but rather to communicate a size in relatable terms. When you relate scale to something familiar it elicits connotations from an individual's experience that makes things easier to comprehend.
Most people have seen a football or soccer field and understand the approximate size.
> A football field or soccer field is a perfectly reasonable unit of measure when you're simply trying to convey "a lot" to someone.
At least in the UK it's somewhat of a 'meme', a byword for a tabloid, in the same league as irrelevant mentions of age and house price, etc.
We measure trunk space in terms of bodies it can hold. It's funny and clearly relates the capacity.
We do? Depends on who "we" is, I suppose...
I've seen golf bags mentioned quite often. But, come to think of it, that's about equivalent to a body, isn't it?
It's a common joke unit of measure to estimate the size of a small enclosed space.
An example: https://youtu.be/J-falgJE1xg?t=211
If everyone uses a different unit then it may not appear to be a lot at all. Nobody is measuring office space in football fields so how am I supposed to know how a football field sized manufacturing plant compares to an office building?
In general conversation, or general news articles people don't need exact units of measure because they're not acting upon that information. You use an approximation like football fields because it elicits a connotation and can help people easily grasp the scale.
Funny, because it's about 1700Ha, what is a perfectly relatable number, or, if you like your numbers small, 1.7km^2. That's around the size of a district.
> We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha.
It's really very tired.
Americans don't even use Imperial units. We use United States Customary Units [1] which are more like siblings to Imperial units than offspring.
United States customary units have been based on familiar Metric units since the Mendenhall Order in 1893.
School children in the United States have studied the metric system for generations.
The United States was one of the original 17 signatories of the Metre Convention in 1875. As far as I can tell no commonwealth countries were early adopters.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units
> United States customary units have been based on familiar Metric units since the Mendenhall Order in 1893.
No. They may be defined in terms of Metric units, but they aren't "based on" them. If they were based on them, they'd be a sensible integer (or decimal-factor) multiple of them, not some weird fractional measure. An inch being 25.4 millimeters may be the current definition of an inch, but that arbitrary length isn't based on anything in the metric world -- it's still just as based on the average length of the top joint of a medieval craftsman's thumb as it's always been.
Ok, fine, defined in terms of.
There’s nothing odd about the fractional scale, nor is it unique to US Customary Units.
No, there's nothing odd about the fact that units based on one set of measures become fractional when expressed in units of another measurement system. It just shows that neither is based on the other.
And of course "the fractional scale is not unique to US Customary Units", since there is no fractional scale within that measurement system. Nor within any other, AFAIK. Your pound consists of an integer number of ounces (right?) and your foot of twelve-point-zerozerozero... inches. The "fractional scale" exists only between measurement systems. (AFAIK. Except maybe old British currency, that was really weird, I'd trust those crazy Englanders to have about six Pi pennies to the shilling or something.)
The meter is based on a fraction of a second.
https://frinklang.org/frinkdata/units.txt is one of the things i find myself reading and using to complain about things. Frink is a conversion tool and calculator, like "how many grains of rice worth of calories is needed to boil 1 liter of water" and even more esoteric stuff. It also can correctly convert between most of the esoteric units (rods, hogsheads, furlongs).
Frink has phone apps, so you don't need a data connection as you would with wolfram alpha or google.
Naah. It's defined in terms of the second, nowadays, but it's based on the circumference of the Earth: The meter was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the poles.
> We use United States Customary Units
Actually no, not for potential difference, current, resistance, impedance, luminosity, amount-ofsubstance …
For those you use the SI units.
Its just length, mass, (plus force and torque).
Not far to go.
The United States does not use "Imperial" units. We use some Customary Units that are defined in terms of SI units and share names with some Imperial units.
The point is that saying "The United States uses Imperial Units" is, generously, ignorant.
yes - for example a US fluid Oz is different from everywhere else, as is a cup, a pint, a Venti (twenty what?) and many of the units used in cooking - using American recipes without translation can produce crap - Imperial fluid ounces are totally different largely due tax politics of the 1700/1800s
Venti is not a US Customary Unit.
No but it is one used in commerce ....
Customer: Venti? is that twenty in Italian?
SB Barista: yes
C: twenty what?
SBB: fluid ounces
C: can't be that, they use metric in Italy, must be litres or millilitres
SBB: litres
(at least that's what they usually answer when I try it)
> You have, and are probably using right now, a voice controlled computer that can convert anything to anything else, by just asking.
There should be a browser plugin that automatically converts units behind the scenes.
"185 million ft^2" and "185 million square feet" are two radically different numbers. One is a square 35 thousand miles on each side. The other is a square 2.6 miles each side.
You're thinking of a "(185 million feet) square"
Yes, it is necessary to use language that is familiar to most of your audience when writing something.
Well, it is the Wall Street Journal. It shouldn't come as a surprise that an American publication named after an American landmark uses American units.
Americans, myself included, generally acknowledge that the metric system is better but we are already familiar with US units. There's nothing really wrong with US units either in terms of accurate measurement. In an ideal world we would use metric, but transitioning would come at monumental costs - never mind the re-training of an entire population - just so we can make unit conversions a tiny bit easier.
I get it. You're not familiar with US units like we are so you have to do conversions to make sense of the measurements - probably with a calculator since the ratios aren't simple, whole numbers. But remember Americans have to do the same whenever we read almost any foreign publication. Difference is I never see HN or Reddit comments complaining about metric units.
A meter seems to me linked to the human body just as much as the foot.
"The metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle"
That factor of ten is because we have ten fingers. There's no cosmic significance to ten or ten million. Or to the size of a line of longitude on our particular planet.
And a meter is almost exactly a yard, or three feet anyway.
The use of the decimal system is kind of funny because for the longest time large parts of Europe used a 20 based system for a lot of common math. You can still see this in French, where 99 is spelled out as "four times twenty and nineteen". Even in English you can find the remains of the 20-based system, because of the way numbers are expressed: twenty-one, but not tenny-one or even one-teen; twenty-five but not onety-five but fifteen.
The foot is directly based on a person's body part (which caused major issues when bordering jurisdictions used different sizes for a "foot"). The denomination used for meters is a lot more disconnected, its basis focused on the planet instead of on a body part. The choice for the decimal system is much more akin to the choice of 3/12/8/10 in the imperial system.
You can also quickly run into issues if you assume a meter is almost exactly a meter, there's a 9% difference there. The difference can quickly add up, and plenty of international orders have been messed up that way. The distances are similar enough that they serve the same use in day to day expressions, but they're certainly not "almost exactly" the same.
>its basis focused on the planet instead of on a body part
It was based on both, and both measurements are completely determined by the happenstance of life on earth rather than the laws of nature.
>which caused major issues when bordering jurisdictions used different sizes for a "foot"
The meter has also had varying definitions leading to slightly different values. Obviously if you are going to base it on the size of the earth there is going to be some uncertainty and of course that's not the current definition.
I'm not really trying to convince you or anybody that meters are not superior to yards, just that it's hard to explain why without appealing to prejudice and/or making categorical statements that are false.
>The choice for the decimal system is much more akin to the choice of 3/12/8/10 in the imperial system.
Is it correct to call SI the decimal system? Powers of ten time units never caught on above seconds.
> There's no cosmic significance to ten or ten million.
Cosmic? No. But social? For sure. 99.99% of math the layman will encounter is in base 10.
Picture some American saying there's no point in knowing languages other than English because 99.99% of the people you will encounter know it.
Thankfully we're slowly getting rid of that abomination and replacing it with something reasonable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_metric_screw_thread
A classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pikrntjcbyw
You sir/madam, have mastered the art of saying a lot and yet saying nothing.
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.