It's still absolutely fascinating to me that basically the whole modern tech industry and the economic growth from it rests on the shoulders of a single company that has all of their important factories on a single island that's under constant threat of invasion. On top of that they themselves are reliant on a single company that's able to produce the machine required to print the wafers.

I don't know if TSMC has anything to do with hard drive production, but the reliance on very few players is also a problem in that industry.

Investors love a monopoly, and establishing this required more than a trillion dollars of investment sustained over a couple decades.

> rests on the shoulders of a single company that has all of their important factories on a single island

Isn't this just taking the oft-proposed explore vs exploit dichotomy to the logical conclusion of the "exploit" side?

Every single arbitrarity-finely-divided thing "should" be handled by the single (group|process) that has the greatest relative advantage at that one thing.

And you end up with the total variety/detailedness of everything matching what the substrate of the economy (ie, people with specialized training or education) has capacity to support. So at the limit there is at most one person who knows how to do any one specific thing.

(And the global economic system becomes infinitely fragile, but eh who's counting.)

It's only this way because the American ruling class would rather ship jobs overseas to increase their wealth than competently establish an industrial sector that would pay good wages to average people.

Turns out letting a bunch of MBAs plan your economy is extremely foolish.