Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

A Practical Guide for going to space Part 2: from orbit to the Moon

This is the second post in my weeklong series about space travel.  Yesterday’s post can be found here and in it I explained the basic mechanics of getting from the ground into orbit.  To summarize, getting into orbit is all about getting enough horizontal velocity (relative to the ground) such that gravity pulls your journey around the body you’re orbiting and not back into the body’s surface.  To do so you need to get above Earth’s atmosphere (where atmospheric drag would sap you of velocity and allow gravity to pull you back in) which is why spaceships start their journey by going up, but most of the energy will be expended gaining the horizontal velocity.  Secondly I discussed changing an orbit, in particular how firing your rockets (“burning” for short) in the prograde direction expands your orbit, while firing them in the retrograde direction contracts your orbit.  These will be important concepts for getting to the moon.

So if we’re in a spaceship in orbit around the earth, how do we get to the moon?  Well the moon is just a body that orbits the earth at a very long distance, so in principle there’s not much difference between going to the moon and when we visited our friend’s spaceship in Part 1.  Let’s assume that like last time, our orbital plane is the same as the moon’s orbital plane, so again all we have to do is burn prograde to expand our orbit to a point where it comes close to the moon.  In reality the calculations for this are diabolical, especially with the hand-calculation used by NASA in the 60s.  The prograde burn turns a circular orbit into an elliptical one with its periapsis (the point of the orbit which is furthest from the earth) hopefully intersecting the moon’s orbit at a point when the moon will be close to it.  But if done correctly, then at the furthest point of our spaceship’s orbit we will come close to the moon, having crossed over into its gravitational hill sphere several hours beforehand.

But we’re not done yet.  Just getting our ship close to the moon isn’t enough, we’ll likely just pass right by it and continue on our orbit around the earth.  We need to get into orbit around the moon.  Again from Part 1: an orbit is just when you’re moving fast enough relative to a body that gravity can’t pull your trajectory back down to the surface, but not so fast that you fly off into space.  If we got to the moon by burning from the earth, then we’ll have so much velocity relative to the moon that we can’t just get into orbit, we need to slow down relative to the moon so that its gravity can bend our trajectory back into an orbit.  And if burning prograde speeds you up, then burning retrograde slows you down.  In this case retrograde will be in relation to our speed relative to the moon, rather than relative to earth, but retrograde we must burn if we are to create an orbit.

So finally we are in orbit around the moon.  We burned prograde from our earth orbit to extend it outwards towards the moon, then once close to the moon we burned retrograde relative to the moon in order to slow down and get into a moon orbit.  Now orbiting the moon we would be able to look down at the lunar surface and pick out a landing site.  Getting down onto the moon is now just the opposite of getting up off of the earth.  For earth we burned vertically at first to gain height and then horizontally to gain horizontal momentum and create an orbit.  For the moon, we first burn retrograde to lose horizontal momentum in order to decay our orbit to the point where it intersects the ground, then as we fall towards the moon we will gain vertical momentum from gravity pulling us down.  As we approach the lunar surface we can perform a final burn to slow both our horizontal and vertical moment to zero, or as close to it as possible before final touchdown.  Congratulations, we have landed on the moon.  

You’ll notice this explanation has so far been missing a few pieces that you might remember from the Apollo program: there’s no discussion of a separate lunar module and leaving a crewmember behind in space, for instance.  Those will all be discussed in a later post where I talk about weight and fuel requirements.  For now, I’d like to enjoy a game of lunar golf, and tomorrow we can discuss getting back to earth.

A Practical Guide for going to space. Part 1: from Earth to orbit

Over the next week I’d like to set down my understanding of how going to space works.  Most of this has been gleamed from my academic career as well as having fun in Kerbal Space Program, but I’ve noticed that despite the half century of progress since America first went to the moon, most people I’ve met don’t know how space travel works or why spaceships work the way they do.  So I just wanted to set down my understanding in hopes of helping someone else who might be reading.

Step one of most any space travel is getting into orbit, everything else comes from there.  As XKCD taught us (https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/) getting into space is about speed more than height.  Being in orbit is about moving around the earth fast enough that gravity can’t bend your trajectory back to the earth’s surface, it can only bend your trajectory around the earth.  Don’t go too fast or gravity won’t even be able to keep your trajectory around the earth, instead you’ll fly off into the solar system.

So with that said, the primary necessity of a spaceship is to gain horizontal velocity (relative to the surface) so that gravity will keep them in orbit and not pull them back to the ground.  Spaceships only go up so that they can escape the atmosphere and not have it sap them of all their precious horizontal velocity, so while a spaceship starts its journey thrusting vertically to get off the ground, it quickly adjusts to a more horizontal position in flight such that it continues to gain vertical speed but gains horizontal speed at a much much greater rate.  From there, the key is to just keep gaining horizontal speed until you reach the point where gravity can’t bend your trajectory back towards the ground anymore, and as long as you’re above the atmosphere so it can’t sap you of horizontal velocity then voila you’re in orbit.

From Orbital rendezvous and changing obits

So once you’re in orbit, what do you do up there?  Have a party in your spaceship maybe.  Call your friends to go visit them in their spaceships.  But this gets to the tricky question of how you’d get to their spaceship.  Keep in mind that when you’re in orbit, you’re not stationary.  You’re hurtling around the earth at about thousands of miles per hour.  Let’s say you’re in an orbit that is just 250 miles above the surface, about the height of the ISS.  Your friend is 1000 miles above the surface and you want to visit them.  How would you go about doing that?

First one needs to understand how to change an orbit to begin with.  I’ll start with the most basic of the basic: prograde and retrograde.  When you’re in an orbit, prograde refers to the direction you are moving in at any particular time, and retrograde refers to the opposite direction from prograde.  So if you’re in a spaceship whizzing around the earth, look straight ahead in your direction of travel and you’re looking prograde.  Look behind you and you’re looking retrograde.  These are important because these directions are how we can change an orbit and visit our friend.

Point your ship so it’s front is pointing prograde and its thruster is pointing retrograde, fire the engines and you will give yourself more velocity in the prograde direction.  Doing this will expand your orbit, making you orbit be further away from the body you are orbiting (although it will mostly expand the part of your orbit on the other side of the planet from you).  Fire your engines in the retrograde direction and you will contract your orbit.  This is how you can visit your friend.  If you’re in a circular orbit at 250 miles above the equator, and they are in a circular orbit 1000 miles above the equator, you need to expand your orbit such that at least part of it crosses that 1000 mile mark.  Expanding and contracting your orbit is how you’re going to have to go anywhere in space, it doesn’t really work to aim your rocket *at* a thing and fire the engine, that’s now how space works.

So you finally have an orbit that crosses your friend’s orbit and at the point of crossing you and your friend will be only a few hundred meters from each other, so you can finally visit him in his capsule, right?  Not entirely, there’s one final thing.  At the point of crossing your relative velocities (how fast your moving relative to *each other*) will probably not be zero, and this can cause you to blow past each other at the moment of closest approach (https://youtu.be/CnxpsV_FMsI?t=3181).  If you actually want to get in your friend’s capsure and have a party, you need to fix that.  To do so, during closest approach you need to fire your rockets in a direction that reduces your speed relative to your friend’s spaceship.  This part requires a little math and is hard to explain without visuals, but trust me when I say it’s a necessary part of the procedure.  Reducing your speed relative to your friend’s spaceship will cause the two of you to match speeds, and your orbits will begin to potentially look almost identical to each other (since you’re going the same speed at the same point in space).  Once you have perfectly matched speeds with your friend, you can *now* point your rocket in their direction and fire the engine, because since you aren’t moving relative to each other things finally work intuitively like they do on earth.  You can then use this to dock with their craft, get in, and have your party.

So this has been a fun little trip, we talked about how to get into orbit and how to change an orbit.  This all would be easier to explain with visual aids and in my mind this would work better as a YouTube video, maybe some day I’ll make it one.  For now though this is only part 1 of space travel.  Next up, actually getting from orbit to the moon.

How much are people on the street worried about Monkeypox?  An informal survey.

Over the past weekend I went out on the street to do an informal survey of everyone I could find to ask them two questions: had they heard of Monkeypox?  And were they doing anything to protect themselves from Monkeypox?  The answers somewhat surprised me.

Every single person I spoke to had heard of Monkeypox.  I was expecting at least one or two to have not heard of it but literally everyone had.  So at least that’s good that some public health information had filtered through.

As for if they were doing anything to protect themselves, the overwhelming majority said no.  A few said they were using “masks and social distancing” which means either they were treating Monkeypox like COVID or they just gave a COVID-like answer to my question.  A few told me they weren’t doing anything to protect themselves because the disease is only circulating among men who have sex with men.  And a few said that they didn’t know what they should do to protect themselves or didn’t have time to learn what to do.  But again, the overwhelming majority of people said they weren’t doing *anything*.

It seems to me like Monkeypox just isn’t conjuring the same fear among the folks on the street that it is online.  It especially isn’t conjuring the COVID fear, I remember people almost running away from each other if they got too close in April 2020.  I’d like to hear from other people, if anyone else can share what if anything they are doing to protect themselves from Monkeypox.

Full Disclosure: this was my script for the survey.  Question 1: “Have you heard of Monkeypox?” Question 2: “Are you changing your behavior or doing anything differently to protect yourself from Monkeypox?”

Random thought: I prefer real-time-with-paused to turn-based in my party RPGs

It feels like the world has passed me by on this one.  I have always held Baldur’s Gate up as being basically exactly what I want in the feel of a party-based RPG, and yet every discussion online I’ve seen has been the opposite.  When Pillars of Eternity 2 came out, it sold terribly.  I have my own opinions on that but one explanation that was making the rounds was “turn based is a far more tactical feel for an RPG, real time with pause is outdated, that’s why Divinity 2 sold so well and Pillars 2 sold so poorly.”  The devs even seemed to believe this, as after I left Pillars 2, they patched in a turn-based mode for the game.  Well I played some of Divinity 2 and I have to say I truly truly wish this were real-time with pause.

Divinity’s system relies a lot on the minute positioning of spells.  One pixel off can mean the difference between incinerating your enemies vs your allies.  The maps contain plenty of pillars and Line-of-sight blockers to force you to consider positioning, and yet I feel like the positioning is just not fun to engage with.  There are two archers and a warrior at the end of the hall,I want to hide my mage so they can hit the warrior but not get hit by the archers.  How far behind the pillar do I need to be?  I sit in a spot that looks good and… nope.  A little off, I cannot hit the warrior.  Well now I have to spend more AP in order to finagle my positioning just right.  In Real time (Pillars), this would take about a second, which is nothing in the timescale of the battle.  I unpause, move a bit, check, and yep it’s fine.  But here that 1 AP is 25% or 20% of my total for this turn, which can easily mean the difference between getting the spell off or not.  The worst is how intuitive it can sometimes be, a lot of iron stuff lying around has big gaping holes in it (think like the iron bars of a cell).  Can I fire stuff through or does this count as solid so I should instead hide behind it?  Infuriatingly it depends.

So while position matters a whole lot, I generally ignore it because it’s not fun to engage with.  When you’re trying to get something just right, the difference between success and failure is very minuscule, and the AP system means those minute adjustments cost action points, so while a mistake in positioning in Pillars costs me a couple of seconds to fix, a mistake in positioning in Divinity can cost me my entire turn.  And because the mistakes are so punishing, the system is opaque, and I’m not yet feeling any situations where a perfectly executed fireball won the battle, I feel no compulsion to “get good” at this system, and I don’t have much fun trying.

Faulkner is disappointing in Pokémon HeartGold

I’m playing through Pokémon HeartGold and I have to say I’m kind of disappointed with Gym Leader Faulkner. 

So I played Pokémon Gold on a gameboy color back in the 90s, and I remember thinking Faulkner was a kind of clever gym leader.  He used flying type Pokémon, which are weak against both rock-types and electric-types.  Funnily enough Pokémon of those types are available within a short walk of his gym, so it seems like he should be easy to beat, right?  Just catch a rock-type (geodude) or electric-type (mareep) Pokémon and you can waltz in and beat him.  But Faulkner had a trick up his sleeve, his Pokémon knew mud-slap, a ground-type move that was super effective against both rock-type and electric-type Pokémon.  So you’d walk in with a geodude and a mareep and he’d completely demolish you.  In-universe I’m sure a lot of 10-year-olds ran out of his gym crying.

It was cool to me because it makes sense why he would have that move.  He wants to win but has to use flying-types which are weak to rock and electric moves.  So he devises a way to turn the tables on anyone using those types against him.  But apparently the move mud-slap wasn’t actually any good, because in HeartGold he no longer uses it.  Now you *can* beat Faulkner easily with a nearby mareep or geodude, and it just makes him seem less clever to me, even if the move that replaced mud-slap is probably a better move overall.

Capitalism 2: A game that makes you appreciate loans

I’ve played a lot of video games in my time, and let me tell you Capitalism 2 is a doozy.  You can get it on the Steam store for about 10 dollars and that’s about what it’s worth because it’s decades old and the UI is painful.  Still, I’ve played a lot of it and it does help you appreciate some nifty real-world concepts.

For those of you who have never played it (ie everyone), Capitalism 2 is a game in which you take control of a large corporation with nothing more than a few million dollars and a dream of riches.  You then use that money to try to turn a profit by manufacturing and selling one or more of the games 50 or so unique goods.  There’s food items, furniture, electronics, cars, and they all have their own production chains and sales strategies for you to manage.  Food items are all about quality and price so you just need to invest a lot into your farms and try to outcompete your competitors.  Designer clothes are all about branding, so you need to spend millions of dollars on advertising to gain market share.  While electronics require investment into R&D before you can even begin to try making them.  It’s kind of fun to throw down with a few AI companies and compete to turn $1 million into $1 billion, but if the game has taught me one thing it’s that loans are overpowered.

A loan, both in game and in real life, is a way to get money now in exchange for money later.  While the total amount you’d have to pay back is greater than the face value of the money you get loaned to you, you can do a lot of things with money now to make that be a net gain.  You can invest it, start a company, build a factory (if you’re a corporation), and all those things can net you a bigger gain than the interest and principle you will need to pay back.  The difficulty is of course that the real world is a world of uncertainty, you don’t know for sure if your investments will pan out or your factory will work, you’re taking a risk and that risk includes a downside.

In Capitalism 2 however there is near perfect information so most of the risk doesn’t exist.  You know instantly what the price of every good on the market is and how they will change in the future.  You know exactly who your competitors are and usually you know what they’re building.  With perfect information there is almost zero risk, and with zero risk there is never a reason not to max out your available loans to build new factories to make new profits.  The AIs in this game by the way don’t seem to be programmed to ever take loans, they wait until they have the cash in hand before ever buying something, so this is a technique only available to the player.  But as I said pretty much any investment is a certain success, so loans are just free capital for the player.  And that’s why they’re so OP in Capitalism 2.

Why do people still try to defend cryptocurrency as being “early” technology? This isn’t growing pains, it’s a scam

Bitcoin was launched in January of 2009, making it roughly 13.5 years old by now.  In that time, it has gone from scam to scam to scam and yet time and again the True Believers make excuses for both it and the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem.  “The tech is still early,” “it’s like the early days of the internet” “any day now mass market use will take off” and it NEVER EVER DOES.  Let’s get some context going:

Google was incorporated in 1998, and by 2008 it had 20 billion dollars in revenue.  Not valuation mind you, yearly revenue

Amazon was launched in 1994, and by 2005 they were offering Amazon Prime, which promised unlimited 2-day shipping on over a million in-stock items for a modest yearly fee

Microsoft was founded in 1975 and by 1985 they launched the Windows 1 which sold over half a million units.

Each of these modern tech giants started small, but had reached mass market appeal in less than a decade.  What does Bitcoin have?  Where is the mass market adoption of Bitcoin as a unit of currency?  Where are the merchants and vendors who take Bitcoin instead of Visa or Mastercard?  Time and again minor partnerships area announced where some sucker claims to accept Bitcoin, Bitcoiners exclaim that this is the beginning of mass adoption, and then Bitcoin is quietly removed from the available payment methods or ends up being the smallest method used by a large amount.  Bitcoin doesn’t compete with PayPal, or Apple Pay or any credit card or payment processor because it sucks and always has sucked.  And mass adoption isn’t right around the corner, we aren’t in the early days of Bitcoin we’re over a decade in and it is still useful for nothing more than scams and ponzi schemes.  Every now and then new stories pop up that *this* time it will be different, *this* will definitely be the start of mass adoption.  And of course every time it’s wrong.  I could go through every year from 2010 to today and find someone claiming that this would be the start of mass adoption too.  It’s always been nothing more than scams and hype.

I’ve decided to write a post in Chinese, just to see if I can

Go to the bottom to see my English translation of what I was trying to write

这些天我觉得我的学中文的时间无用。在高中学，我四年学了中文。大学的时候我在学了四年的中文。可是在美国我不可能用这个语文。我的同工不说，我的新闻不用，每一个我的美国的生活的东西是英文的，不是中文的。

可是我特别长的时候学了中文。我特别努力。我想用我的技能。我可以写一下，我可以说一下，可是听，看，都难死了。

我不知道要是这个是真的中文还是写错了的gibberish。我不知道很多有用的词，可是我怎么可以学新词？我已经说：我没有说中文的朋友，新闻，东西。

我试了一下看中文书。太难了，我的中文不太好。我不觉得太高兴了，也是写这个东西不太好的意思。下次我一定必须写关于别的话题。

These days I think my time studying Chinese was useless.  In High School, I studied Chinese for four years.  When I was in University I studied four more years of Chinese.  But in America I can’t use this language.  My coworkers don’t speak it, my news doesn’t use it, everything in my American life is English, not Chinese.

But I studied Chinese for so long.  I worked so hard.  I want to use my skills.  I can write a little, I can speak a little, but listening and reading are both too hard.

I don’t know if this is true Chinese language or incorrectly written gibberish.  I don’t know a lot of useful vocabulation, but how can I study new vocabulary?  I already said it: I don’t have friends, news, or things that use Chinese.

I tried a little to read Chinese books.  Too hard, my Chinese is not too good.  I don’t feel too happy, also writing this stuff isn’t too interesting.  Next time I definitely must write about a different topic.

Can you gamify science?

Let’s start with one of the oldest and most popular games: Super Mario Bros for the NES.  In it, the player controls Mario past a number of hazards, through a number of levels to rescue the princess.  Young children in the 80s and 90s would spend hours upon hours playing, beating and (important for today’s topic) *learning* this game.  See, beating a video game is a learning process.  As kids play, they learn to play better and better until they play well enough to beat it.  Then they keep playing and learn to play better and better to beat it faster, more consistently, more stylishly or what have you.  Some of this learning is physical, you can train your reflexes to work faster, but a lot of it is actually learning how the game works and what you need to do to complete it.

On the surface, learning how the game works seems kind of basic, but is it?  The game has a large number of enemies with their own patterns, and those enemy patterns can combine in a large number of ways to challenge the player.  The player has to learn how to approach each situation, and how to adapt to a situation that isn’t going how they expected it to.  They may even plan ahead and devise multiple strategies before testing each one out in turn and going with whichever is best.  The player might also be memorizing the map layouts of the levels, the locations of secrets, and all sorts of other things.  It’s safe to say that a lot of real learning is taking place, even if it isn’t “school learning” like what we’re used to.  

Kids do a lot of work learning to play video games, and thus since the very dawn of video games parents and teachers have wondered if that energy could be more productively transferred towards academic learning.  This eventually morphed into a “gamification” push, where many modern schools will put at least some effort into having gamification elements in their teaching in order to motivate students to work as hard at academic learning as they do at gaming learning.  Now, gamification is an INCREDIBLY broad topic and it doesn’t just cover video games that try to teach you things.  I can personally remember playing cheesy point-and-click video games that tried to teach me the parts of the body or the planets of the solar system, but video games themselves are only a small facet.  Gamification can also be as simple as having class leaderboards to encourage students to do well and get good grades, badges or points for completing certain tasks, there are all sorts of ways to gamify a learning task.

But this brings me to today’s question: can you gamify science education?  Now first off it’s very clear that you can gamify *early* science education (thinks like elementary or middle school) since we’ve had those sorts of things for years.  Teaching a student about the human body, or the planets, or the teacher creating a whole Jeopardy! setup to help them learn the parts of a cell, these are all gamification aspects that were used to teach me and many others about science over the past few decades.  But post-secondary education is a different beast and often entails learning things on the cutting edge that aren’t always fully accepted by the entire community.  Science does have its internal struggles, and if a student learns by reading papers (which is necessary to study topics on the cutting edge) they will by necessity be learning about at least some ideas which will later be proven false.  That’s ok, science isn’t a set of facts, it’s a process for discovering the truth, but that does make it harder to “gamify” since you can’t just program a game with right and wrong answers, because on the cutting edge *we don’t have all the right and wrong answers* and we’re learning new things every day.

I thought long and hard about this question: can you make a video game (or something like it) that would allow students to study a cutting edge topic like proteomics?  I pick this topic because it’s one I know a lot about, and I came away thinking the answer is “no.”  A proteomics game would either be highly simplistic and thus not very useful for cutting edge studies (high school studies perhaps), or would be so complex that you were really studying someone’s protein simulation and not proteomics itself.  Let me explain.

A video game for proteomics would have to have certain limitations.  The first limitation is the pre-defined actions that the programmers allow.  Mario can’t climb walls in Super Mario Bros because the programmers didn’t program that, they only programmed certain actions.  As far as I know, all proteins are biologically synthesized in an N-to-C direction.  So presumably the program would only allow synthesis in this direction, but what if we discover some organism that can synthesize C-to-N?  What if we discover organisms that synthesize or modify their proteins in ways we did not expect, and what if those proteins become scientifically or economically relevant?  A programmer can’t exactly predict every possible action that biological proteins could take, and so can hardly program every possibility.  

OK, so they can’t program every possibility, but what about creating an open-ended system that would allow the “players” to create their own actions?  That brings limitation number two: the approximations used.  An open ended proteomics game would by necessity need to employ certain approximations in the code to allow for proteins to be synthesized and moved around at will, it isn’t feasible to create a perfect simulation that can calculate the effects of every atom and bond in a protein.  So a game would have to use a number of approximations to allow for this open endedness, but then you end up with the problem where students may not be studying anything real but studying only an approximate model that doesn’t work in the real world.  My most notable reminder of this is the game Kerbal Space Program which is a fun little astronaut simulator that, due to computer limitations, has to use a set of heavy approximations for gravity that make it very inaccurate with the real world.  This leads to some fun but physically impossible creations such as perpetual motion machines and giant mecha.  

It’s not just the scope but the scale.  You can do so many things with proteins, there are 20^10 combinations of 10 amino acids.  All those possibilities can’t be programmed in.  The best molecular dynamics currently has is the ability for super computers to roughly approximate the actions of proteins by simulating all the atoms and bonds, but even those simulations require heavy approximations.  So if you try to make more and more approximations, you end up with a program where students aren’t studying proteomics but rather studying the approximations that are built into it.  

The final, most important piece of this is: how would you make such a thing fun?  Science, as in actual science, is fun to me because I get to learn and discover new things.  As said before, a video game would necessitate such approximations that nothing “new” could really be discovered.  Games like Kerbal Space Program are fun because they give you the means to perform some of humanity’s greatest feats for yourself like going to the moon or launching a robot to Mars, but what are the equivalent actions that could be done in a proteomics video game?  I honestly can’t think of anything proteomic that makes me think “man I’d like to do that for myself!”

So yeah sorry to be a debbie downer but I think the idea is unworkable for now.  Stick with fun little games for early childhood education and then read papers when you go to college.

Do dividends solve inflation?  Yes in theory, who knows in practice.

Congress just passed the CHIPS act giving billions of dollars to Intel, who turned around and cut their fab investments to hand money to investors as dividends.  One of the benefits of CHIPS was supposed to be reducing inflation by increasing the supply of microchips from companies building more fabs.  That obviously won’t be the case if companies follow Intel’s lead in handing the subsidies to their investors as a dividend.  But it made me think of how neoliberal economics believes that inflation is supposed to be self-correcting.

When demand for a particular product outstrips supply, prices will of course rise.  But what are the consequences of a rise in price?  First it means the consumers of the product will have higher costs, but that will incentivize consumers to use less of the product (reducing their demand and thus costs).  If those consumers are companies, then this can act as a market force driving efficiency, companies that can produce the same number or quality of output products while using less of the pricier input products will have an advantage over those who are more hamstrung.  In some ways we are seeing this with car companies offering cars that don’t have the full range of interior knick knacks due to the chip shortage.  If they can still produce a car while using less computer chips, then they will have an advantage over companies that cannot.  This means that the more efficient companies should remain competitive while the less efficient ones get removed from the market, thereby decreasing demand for the chips overall thanks to these efficiency gains.

For producers of the product however, when prices rise the company makes more money.  Now not all that money will be reinvested in the company, a lot of it will be handed back to the shareholders in the form of dividends.  But to neoliberals that isn’t a problem, that’s the solution.  When the company hands big dividends to its shareholders, the price of the company’s stock will rise greatly.  Everyone and their mother will realize that holding that company’s stock will net you a passive dividend income, and will rush to buy up the shares, driving share price up.  As I noted before companies like having a high share price because it gives them a source of money that they control.  They can use that share price to compensate employees and invest in large capital projects, both of which can theoretically lead to higher production either through higher quality/more motivated employees or through more factories or whatever.  And not only that, the return on investment for dividends should cause more money to flow into new companies as well that want to enter the market, because no one can resist those sweet sweet profits.  This higher production means supply increases and the cost of the good goes back down, thus massive dividends from profitable products are supposed to act as a reward mechanism that entices more investors to invest in that sector of the economy.

This paradigm, by the way, is why some neoliberal economists will oppose market interventions to alleviate shortages.  Price controls or rationing of good are supposed to mess up both the demand and supply side of the equation.  If price is controlled then the supplying company can’t make a higher profit, meaning they can’t expand supply and new companies won’t enter the market.  Likewise price controls mean that there isn’t as much gain from being an efficient demand-side company.  Rationing works much the same way as price controls, artificially keeping the price low by constraining demand.

So according to this theory of economics, supply-induced inflation should always be self-correcting.  The high price of chips should have pushed demand-side companies to buy less of them, and supply-side companies to sell more of them, both of which push the price down.  The question is whether any of this works in the real world, and the bigger question is whether the CHIPS act will sufficiently spur investment in fabs considering the money has basically no strings attached.  We’ll have to wait and see if every company decides to act like Intel.