onetimeusename (u/onetimeusename)

onetimeusename commented on Texas Instruments’ new plants where Apple will make iPhone chips cnbc.com/2025/08/22/apple... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

simonh · 2 days ago

It depends what the minimal needs are, but basically the US has this for chips already. Yes the US only makes older chips, but in fact those are the ones that really matter, that you can’t do without. The ones that are in everything.

However making everything domestically just isn’t really viable for any country any more. The scale of our technological civilization and the diversity of goods and materials it depends on is more that any one continent can support, let alone one country.

It would be possible to collapse that down to one continent if absolutely necessary, but it would be incredibly economically painful and the US would need to give up on a lot of non-essentials and other priorities to devote resources to duplicating capacity that already exists elsewhere.

onetimeusename · 19 hours ago

I am not sure about this. There was a chip shortage from Taiwan a few years ago that led to an auto shortage https://www.npr.org/2021/04/28/991270369/taiwan-races-to-rem...

onetimeusename commented on Determinants and causal effects of admission to selective private colleges [pdf] (2023) nber.org/system/files/wor... · Posted by u/EvgeniyZh

downut · 2 days ago

"Which one do you think Harvard picks?"

Do you not understand what the point of legacy preference admissions is? I will supply it here: Legacies take the place of the higher performing non-legacy candidate, not the equivalent one. Is this difficult to understand? Why?

onetimeusename · 2 days ago

I don't think that's the point of legacy admissions. I think it's purpose is exactly what the grandparent said which is to cultivate a network of people.

The problem with saying legacy preference is to take the place of higher performing non-legacy candidates is that legacy admits generally perform above average at least at Harvard although it's probably true elsewhere. See here[1]: The average SAT score among legacy students was 1543, while it was 1515 for non-legacy students.

So it could still be for replacing higher performing non-legacies meaning Harvard targeted and rejected a bunch of people with even higher SAT scores than the legacies but I don't find that very convincing.

[1] (https://features.thecrimson.com/2023/freshman-survey/academi...)

onetimeusename commented on Determinants and causal effects of admission to selective private colleges [pdf] (2023) nber.org/system/files/wor... · Posted by u/EvgeniyZh

downut · 2 days ago

Now fit legacies into this theory.

The wikipedia page on Legacy Preferences is illuminating. Note the Larry Summers quote:

Former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers has stated, "Legacy admissions are integral to the kind of community that any private educational institution is."

onetimeusename · 2 days ago

Let's say two people are applying to Harvard and it's the year 2019 (I think they stopped legacy admissions recently). They both have a 1550 and 4.3 GPA. Both went to good high schools. Both helped underprivileged youths learn to code. However one of them has two alumni parents who are both well known, Pulitzer Prize winning journalists in DC that helped expose the corruption of the much hated X politician during the Y scandal, they are White House Correspondents and they are regularly featured on the news. The other student has parents who are not alumni. Harvard has to pick between these two students. Which one do you think Harvard picks?

Note that you cannot argue the legacy student actually has a lower SAT score because Harvard admitted legacy students had higher than avg. SAT scores and because the study controlled for SAT score.

Believe it or not, this is the kind of profile a lot of legacy admits would have.

onetimeusename commented on U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel cnbc.com/2025/08/22/intel... · Posted by u/givemeethekeys

miohtama · 3 days ago

There is only 1 winner and 1 loser: Intel.

It's the only chip manufacturer "left" in the US. The argument is national security: the US expects China to invade Taiwan and this will kill TSMC in the process.

Whether this will happen or not can be debated, but this is what the government expects.

onetimeusename · 3 days ago

This is my thought on it too. I don't think this is meant to be a political win so much as US intelligence views chip manufacturing extremely strategically. I also don't know about what will happen to TSMC. But the US has been pushing for US made GPUs as well. This goes back to Biden's admin as well.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/us-govt-pushes-nv...

onetimeusename commented on How well does the money laundering control system work? journals.uchicago.edu/doi... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

bradley13 · 4 days ago

Moving money around is a crime...why? It results in massive intrusiveness by government: full insight into everyone's finances, without evidence of a crime.

And, yes, this does get abused. Government is people, some of whom are evil, or out for revenge, or whatever. I had an acquaintance whose accounts were periodically frozen by the IRS, because he had pissed off the local office. He would get them unblocked, but only after weeks of missing mortgage payments and other bills.

onetimeusename · 4 days ago

Ending anonymous banking like in Switzerland was a major objective for the US. They said it was because it allowed money laundering for terrorists. People will get upset when the government talks about ending encryption in order to stop terrorism but the same concept applied to money apparently doesn't matter.

In practice we have a system where money laundering has not ended and we have much more financial surveillance for average citizens. That was probably the purpose all along and it never had anything to do with finding tax evaders or stopping terrorism.

onetimeusename commented on Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police nytimes.com/live/2025/08/... · Posted by u/Tadpole9181

jacquesm · 14 days ago

For me it doesn't really raise any interesting questions at all: things are statistically not 'bad' per se, besides, you could trade your democracy for an autocracy or a dictatorship and end up 'safe' from small crime but meanwhile have your whole country looted.

Maybe some people prefer that but I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them than some kind of re-invention of the USSR, which didn't really bother with collecting crime statistics, and where crime was - so they claimed - very low (this really wasn't the case, especially not if you consider the behavior of lots of highly placed individuals, who could get away with just about anything, except of course stealing from their bosses).

onetimeusename · 13 days ago

> I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them

What do you count as garden variety here and what makes you say the government is trustworthy? I think law enforcement has become extremely bureaucratic and that generally lawyers, but especially DC lawyers, view the criminal justice system as racist so they made it much less punitive and much more bureaucratic. The end result is more crime. Trump saw an opportunity and he is exploiting it even though it's stupid to fight crime this way. I would bet the worst that comes from this is we run an expensive experiment in seeing if NG patrols reduce crime. In a few months, this will be forgotten about. If I am wrong and this turns into a coup d'état or autocratic takeover, you can collect $100 from me.

onetimeusename commented on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act bbc.com/news/articles/cjr... · Posted by u/phlummox

milesrout · 14 days ago

None of what you said is true. The Judicial Committee of the House of Lords was renamed the Supreme Court and moved to a different building (but otherwise essentially unchanged) in 2005 under Tony Blair's Labour government.

onetimeusename · 13 days ago

No, that's not accurate. The Supreme Court of the UK was established in 2009 so I was off by a year. That would have been under Gordon Brown.

onetimeusename commented on Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act bbc.com/news/articles/cjr... · Posted by u/phlummox

bArray · 14 days ago

> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone".

Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some.

> In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it would have to verify the identity of its contributors, undermining their privacy and safety.

Some of the articles, which contain factual information, are damning for the UK government. It lists, for example, political scandals [1] [2]. Or information regarding hot topics such as immigration [3], information that the UK government want to strictly control (abstracting away from whether this is rightfully or wrongfully).

I can tell you what will (and has already) happened as a result:

1. People will use VPNs and any other available methods to avoid restrictions placed on them.

2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win.

3. The likelihood of a British constitution is increasing, which would somewhat bind future parliaments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_scandals_in_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Labour_Party_(UK)_sca...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_Unit...

onetimeusename · 14 days ago

Why does this increase the likelihood of a (written I assume) constitution? I remember I saw a thing about David Cameron talking about wanting one. I think he also created a Supreme Court. I read into it and it seemed like there was no real reason for either a written constitution or a Supreme Court. Both of those things were popularized by the US's government so maybe that points to why.