It's not just the chips but also the packaging and supply chain. Making chips in Arizona that have to be sent back to Taiwan for packaging is costly. What the customers want is a reliably, steady supply at a reasonable cost. Whether that comes from Taiwan or Arizona doesn't really matter.

Trump is pushing for the US fabs, but TSMC might also be mitigating future risk in case of the theoretical Chinese invasion. There's another angle that Trump likely would hate. The Arizona plants allow TSMC to legitimately send a bunch of Taiwanese to the US on L visas.

Non-disclosure agreements are only as potent as the lawyers behind them, which in this case means that Apple's lawyers would completely overwhelm whatever piddly lawyers a bunch of poor startup founders could afford. That NDA wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on or the flash it's stored in.

This is the way. In addition to the written test, have a 3-minute oral test on the exact same material that the written test covered, one-on-one with each student. That oral test becomes a multiplier against the written test score. But this does take more time and effort on the part of the professor. For 100 students, that comes out to well over 5 hours.

The students should be told in advance so that they will be scared into studying.

I'm surprised there's no mention of Trump and immigration. In STEM fields, anywhere from 30-65% of PhD students are foreign students. For computer science and engineering, the percentage is near 60%. Not being able to get a visa, being fearful of the Trump government, and uncertainty about work visas and green cards is arguably more significant than even funding for some programs.

Or adopt American-style democracy. Have the citizens contemplate why their electricity rates are increasing 25% when most of the benefits are supporting the data centers, and then have those voters vote in the leaders they want. Why are the current leaders helping the data centers? Have they receive individual gifts, or have the companies provided tangible concessions to the county and its people?

"it doesn't provide any real world utility either, Grantham argued. "People don't use it to make serious trades, they don't use it to buy their dinner and pay at the supermarket. ... What it does is allows crooks to move money around," he said.

Do you dispute any part of this guy's explanation of why bitcoin is "useless." Aside from black market money movement and financial speculation, bitcoin literally has no practical use.

Depending on what you define as a small car, this is absolutely not true. There are well over 1 million Toyota Corolla class cars sold annually in the US. Not a single one of these cars is made by an American company. They are mostly Japanese and Korean.

Why does this happen? Executive bonuses. That's why. Compact cars have 5-8% gross margins, but bigger cars like SUVs and trucks have far greater gross margins in the 15-25% range. American companies have myopia. They want to maximize profits now and don't care about or don't understand future profits. They completely believe that the innovator's dilemma is fake news. Yet, Japanese and Korean companies have 40-45% of the US SUV market, and some of this is due to follow-on sales from those 1 million compact cars sold every year.

The biggest problem in AI architecture is data movement. That's why the GPU memory subsystem takes so much chip area, to achieve huge data bandwidth. That's also why GPUs do well in training and are able to handle evolving AI models better than ASICs.

Good points, but to be fair, ultrasonic is currently used to break up kidney stones because it is safe to use it to do so.

Couldn't potential RAM manufacturers lock in long-term contracts, sort of like oil futures? That would be a win-win for phone companies and RAM makers. Even if the big RAM makers try to bust the future market with price dumps, the phone companies would still win due to market predictability, which is a huge thing.

No, the big difference between the Chinese car companies and Tesla, etc. is that there was a deliberate national policy intended to dump below-market priced vehicles in foreign countries. If China simply wanted to foster economic or technological development within China or to advantage a subset of Chinese companies to the detriment of other Chinese companies, no one outside of China would care. The problem is entirely that of a Chinese strategy to promote their companies at the intended detriment of non-Chinese companies.

This proposal doesn't look like a tax but rather like seizure via eminent domain. Taking 50% of someone's property is very close to seizing the property outright. If this were allowed, then the government could seize half of someone's real property without any compensation. I imagine that such a move would be challenged all the way to the Supreme Court.

Perhaps a tax against "income" from funds derived from borrowing against unrealized gains is a better and more fair alternative. It's real money derived from stock holdings, sort of like another form of dividends.

The super big problem with the proposed tax isn't the fairness question. The big problem is that it's a one-time windfall that might trigger recurring spending proposals. Locking in recurring spending based on one-time income is a super stupid financial decision.