Moore's Law
Moore's Law is the semiconductor industry's cult hymn, promising that transistor counts double every 18 months and fueling both exuberant investment and sleepless engineers. It brandishes the banner of progress to justify insane budgets, ignoring the walls of physics and exploding costs in the real world. In practice, it is destined to be buried as another budget line item when it inevitably fails. Yet we cling to the mantra of "just two more years," willingly throwing ourselves into the quagmire of miniaturization. Like any grand myth of progress, it is a species of self-delusion we choose to believe, no matter how impossible it becomes.