The problem the states are going to have is that futures trading, what the CFTC regulates, is gambling. You're betting on what the price of the commodity will do in the future. The moment the CFTC expanded to allowing intangible commodities, the outcome was a foregone conclusion.
I hope you're right, but I'm not convinced. I see a lot of people on the right are getting tired of Trump's craziness, but I'm not sure they wouldn't be fine if it were just dialed back a bit, say to Trump 1.0 levels. In a way it may actually be a good thing that we're only a year and a quarter into a four year term. Assuming Trump doesn't keel over he's got a lot of time to convince Americans that it's a really, really bad idea to elect someone like him. Of course, he'll do a lot of actual damage along the way.
And you're absolutely right that we need the Democrats to avoid the temptation to go hard left just because they have a particularly-hated opposition... but I don't think it's at all certain that they will avoid it.
I think you should take another look at the economic transition from Carter to Reagan.
You can make the argument that Reagan used left wing policies to address economic issues in some instances, in opposition to his campaign promises, or that secular trends or geopolitics hurt Carter, but you can't make the argument that Carter left a good economy for Reagan to fuck up.
You absolutely can, if you really look at what happened and when. What happened, basically, was that Nixon and Ford left Carter with an incredibly-damaged economy, and Carter fixed it, but the fixes took a while to take effect. If Carter had had a second term, those changes would have taken effect while he was in the White House, but he lost. Reagan is to be applauded mostly for not undoing what Carter did.
What did Carter do? The biggest thing he did was to appoint Paul Volcker as Fed chair. Carter knew exactly what Volcker would do, and knew that it would be painful, but believed the economists who told him that it was necessary. They were right, Carter was right to believe them, and Volcker's medicine of high interest rates got inflation under control and the economy moving in the right direction, even though it caused two recessions. Reagan was smart enough to believe the economists, too, so he reappointed Volcker and made some famous speeches, especially the 1982 one in which he told Americans we needed to "Stay the Course". He didn't, of course, mention that it was Jimmy Carter's course that we were staying, but it was.
The other big thing Carter did was massive deregulation. Reagan is also often credited for deregulation, but he did very little of it while Carter did a lot -- energy, telecoms, trucking, airlines... and more. Carter really was "The Great Deregulator", not Reagan.
None of this is because Carter was some sort of economic genius (though he was an extremely smart man). It's because he got good advisors and took good advice. This is a pretty consistent story, actually. I think there are two main reasons why the economy tends to improve during democratic administrations and decline during republican ones: (1) Democratic administrations make better use of experts and (2) Democrats are less likely to go to war (though they do tend to engage in more small-scale, humanitarian interventions). Those are just my opinions, of course, and this is an incredibly complex space.
Something I've noticed is lately outside of safe spaces the right wing keeps their damned mouths shut. Every so often one of them will jump in and yell TDS or something but they never actually tried to defend the actions of anyone on their side or any of their policies anymore. Mostly they either avoid conversations outside of safe spaces entirely or they lurk and mod everything they don't like down.
I'm a member of the Republican party. I have been on paper for decades, and until 2016 regularly (but not exclusively) voted Republican. In 2024 when the state GOP organization decided to switch from primaries to closed caucus meetings, I decided to get active so I could vote against Trump. I've since decided my participation as a never-Trumper is a good idea, we need more people who are fundamentally conservative (or at least small-L libertarian) to get involved to rescue the party and return it to something approaching rationality.
Anyway, that's background to explain why I just got home from the GOP county convention, which was very interesting in that during the whole three-hour meeting I never heard Trump's name mentioned even once, and there were some rather pointed allusions to how important it is that our elected leaders act with careful consideration and to promote peace. I think a lot of the GOP rank and file are getting pretty pissed off. The first break was the refusal to release the Epstein files. Minneapolis made a lot of them uncomfortable, and they found a lot of things that happened hard to defend. (CECOT should have, too, but early on they all believed Trump when he said they were gangsters.). By the time Venezuela came around, most of them had stopped trying to defend, and Iran actually generated some pretty vocal MAGA-world argument against Trump, while the soaring fuel prices just pissed off a lot of his supporters.
Reddit is taking all the heat and standing up to the bully on the playground for them
Are they? I don't see that in the summary or the articles at all. All of the counter-filings are coming from the individual's attorneys, not from Reddit. Reddit is certainly to be applauded for not just voluntarily complying, for actually going to court, but it seems like *main* thing they have done is to notify the user in question, so the user could get lawyers from a non-profit, and it's those lawyers who are doing most of the work.
The affirmative defenses from the person whose name they're trying to get suggests that that law is clearly being abused and has no relevance here, which makes me wonder if someone within the DoJ is intentionally trying to throw the case. Let's hope so!
Could be.
But it could also be the case that the DoJ's lawyers just suck. The DoJ has suffered a massive brain drain of competent attorneys since Trump took office last year. First, they explicitly fired or otherwise drove out anyone who'd gotten tapped for the massive and complex January 6th prosecutions. Then they made clear that loyalty to the president had to take precedence over ethics, legality or morality, and that they would fire any attorney who balked at doing something just because it might get them disbarred, all the while making everyone wonder if at some point the administration was going to begin flatly refusing to obey court orders (they haven't, quite, not yet).
That made all the competent and ethical lawyers leave, as well as many who might have been more ethically flexible but were too smart not to realize how badly continuing to work for the DoJ could burn them. To try to fill the massive vacancies, the DoJ then began a hiring spree, openly advertising that no real qualifications were required, beyond a law degree (any law degree) and loyalty to Trump. You can bet that they mostly got what they asked for.
If that weren't enough, the administration also took innumerable illegal actions that spawned rafts of court cases. Many of these were generated by ICE's misbehavior, but there were lots of others. Given the badly-reduced staff, quantity and quality both, this led to the remaining DoJ attorneys being massively overworked. Like Julie Le (who has since quit) who, when faced with a frustrated judge asking why Le came into his courtroom unprepared in a futile attempt to defend indefensible acts, asked the judge to please hold her in contempt and throw her in jail so she could get 24 hours of sleep.
And if all that weren't enough, the continual abuse of the court system by the administration has led to the judges near-universally deciding they have to treat the DoJ's lawyers as untrustworthy, making their lives that much less pleasant.
Given all of that, any DoJ attorney who has a shot at making a living in private practice, i.e. any of them who is any good, has left. What remains is a group of massively-overworked incompetents.
And if you wonder if the DoJ attorneys weren't always incompetents, because clearly the government doesn't pay as well as private practice... in fact, no, they weren't, because the work was considered quite prestigious. In particular, being a US Attorney was extremely prestigious. It has long been very common for talented lawyers to spend a few years in the private sector, making enough money to set them up for life, and then quit and go become a federal prosecutor. Because working for a high-priced law firm and making a lot of money makes you rich, but it doesn't carry the same sort of prestige as being a US Attorney, and then maybe a federal district or even appellate court judge.
But all that has ended. So, yeah, it could very well be that the government is making crap argument based on the wrong laws because their lawyers just suck. And also because there aren't any actually good arguments available and the lawyers are just throwing out anything so they can tell their bosses that they're pursuing the cases vigorously.
Did that happen when Trump 1.0 ended?
No, and this is why supporters of Trump's behavior aren't worried about the consequences of these expansions of power. They see liberals' reticence for engaging in the same behavior as a weakness that can be exploited since they don't have to worry about the expansion of power being used against them. I'm not arguing that liberals should abuse these expansions of power - I'm simply explaining why Trump's supporters don't fear the effects of those powers coming back to bite them in times of liberal leadership.
Indeed. And the only way this ends well is when voters decide that they don't like government abusing power the way Trump does, regardless of which side does it, and begin hammering those who do it in every election.
Sadly, there is zero evidence that most conservative voters care at all about abuse of office or the rule of law. We're going to have to suffer a lot more pain before people start to wake up, I think. Right now, we're at the stage where most on the right just assume that it always was this way, it was just hidden. We're not going to get any change until they decide that regardless of even if power was always abused and the law was always ignored, it sucks and it has to change.
Amazon US lists it today for $394. Pretty far cry from 650. Interestingly, they list the regular price at $851.
Just convinces me it's pure profit taking.
Nah, just the law of supply and demand. When demand exceeds supply, prices go up. When supply exceeds demand, prices go down. In this case, increasing the supply of SSDs takes a long time because fabs are big, expensive, and take time to construct and bring into production. So, demand has gone but supply has not (much), which means prices go up. How much do they go up? They go up until enough would-be buyers decide the price is too high and they don't want the product.
If the high demand is sustained, this will also result in the suppliers in a competitive market (which flash chips are, unlike high-end CPUs which basically only TSMC can manufacture) increasing their production. That will bring the prices back down, possibly to the same equilibrium price or maybe to a lower one, thanks to increased economies of scale. That'll probably take a while, though.
You apparently made up the part about Google extensions. I have not found any evidence that your claim is true.
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA. So because you couldn't find something, it does not exist? That is pure arrogance. You still have yet to answer a basic question of how Apple was supposed to handle the ONE extension we both know Google implemented Signal Protocol based E2EE.
Presumptuously correct because you don't know jack shit about Apple or TSMC.
You are under the impression that Apple "buys" chips from TSMC. They do not. They buy wafers like everyone else.
Sure, but not A18s. Apple is the only customer.
Again you do not seem to understand that Apple, and Nvidia, and AMD and everyone else buys wafers not chips. That is the pricing and contract structure. No one buys chips.
No, I am not. So not only do you not work in the semiconductor industry because you have no idea what you are talking about, you also lack basic reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. Even if you do work in the semiconductor industry, you clearly don't know about Apple or TSMC and are operating on assumptions from your limited experience.
Please state whether you are complaining that Apple is used parts they could not have used or praising them. You seem unwilling to commit to either proposition.
Because what Apple orders, and receives, from TSMC is individual chips, not whole wafers.
Again you do not know the industry. Everyone measures wafers in contract terms: "With this agreement, AMD now expects to purchase approximately $2.1 billion of WAFERS from GF (Global Foundry) between 2022 and 2025."
The industry does not use chips because that is highly variable. Pricing is based on wafers. Cost is based on wafers. Processing is done on wafers. Yields are based on wafers. Everything is based on wafers.
Perhaps other customers would have to pay for the whole wafer, good or bad, but that isn't how it works with Apple and TSMC.
Please provide evidence that somehow Apple and TSMC uses different pricing and contracts than everyone else. I'll wait.
Apple does not order by the wafer, they order a specific number of chips for a certain number of products they plan to go in.
1) How do you know? Please provide evidence. 2) Apple plans on a certain number of chips BUT TSMC like every other fab manufacture wafers. The contract terms and pricing specify who many wafers will be produced.
Everything binned as not part of Apple's order (5 cores, 4 cores, etc) wait around until Apple purchases them as well
Again no. Apple has already purchased those binned chips as Apple purchased the wafer. Binned chips were considered yield wafer losses.
Regardless of the structure of an order, the result is the same. Apple pays TSMC a different amount of money (more) for an full A18 than they do for a binned 5 core.
Not if Apple pays by the water like everyone else. They do not pay twice. That is a rather large hole in your assumption.
OR mostly ignores the success and demand for these lower cost devices and only create them when TSMC has a "significant" surplus of binned chips sitting around.
That statement alone says you have no clue about semiconductor fabrication supply chains. Chips are made in advance. No OEM decides to wait around before creating chips especially when TSMC is fully booked. Before Apple launched the Neo (or any device) they had a large supply.
While this is a very reasonable explanation, we don't have reason to believe it's actually true. AI "demand" is a great excuse for profit taking, just as AI is a great excuse to fire staff.
Well in this case, why is the price of some of these components very high right now? Firing staff at SK Group, Samsung, or Kyoxia would not explain that. There has been no major disruptions like a natural disaster that would explain it. Tariffs would explain 100% increase in price not the 3-4X increase. At the same time, AI companies have been trying to build (at least fund the building) of AI datacenters.
I cant fathom why we have a shortage of Fabs making this stuff.
There are only a handful of companies that make NAND flash. The main ones are Samsung, SK Group, and Kyoxia. AI companies are 1) buying out all available supply of everything they can. 2) Working deals with these companies to only manufacture their orders. These companies do not have unlimited capacity and building out capacity is years long in the making. So AI gets their products and consumers get whatever is left. The demand for consumer flash has not dropped, just the supply.
Can you please explain what fan base that would that be in context of Starfleet Academy?
A younger generation of viewers who are interested in young adult fiction. If it is set in the Star Trek universe, then the hope would be these fans want to watch the other series as they get older. The problem was always making a series that is true to the core of Star Trek. I didn't watch an entire episode but clips; however, the many reviews I saw said it went off the rails as a Star Trek show especially for the characters.
The newer generation of shows seem to be written by people who seemingly have never watched Star Trek before. Star Fleet Academy had been portrayed in previous series as an elite military academy mirroring real world ones like West Point. Cadets are those individuals who are seeking a military career as officers in Star Fleet. This series has cadets that seemed to be randomly chosen out of pool of character archetypes. For example, the character Sam is a hologram who is only "a few months old" trying to fill in the naive, fish out of water archetype. How in the world would any cadet get into Star Fleet Academy after being alive for a few months? In the lore, enrollment is limited. Applicants have to be screened, and not every applicant is accepted.
One of the main characters is a cadet named Caleb Mir who had been living on his own on the run for most of his life. The one and only reason they give for his acceptance into a premier academy is that the chancellor of Star Fleet Academy Captain Nahla Ake feels guilty for "losing" him when he was young. He does not like Star Fleet but joins the academy to "find" his mother? That is some terrible character backstory. While I have no doubt the Chancellor could have some influence on acceptance of cadets, Caleb Mir has no academic credentials. Also joining an academy seems like the worst way to "find his mother" as he has to squeeze that in with his classes and other obligations.
Jay-Den Kraag is a Klingon cadet the writers seem to want not to be Klingon. He is written against all the stereotypes of a militaristic Klingon warrior. The problem is that while these Klingons exist (Malor from Lower Decks), these are not individuals that would seek to attend Star Fleet Academy as the ultimate goal would be to join Star Fleet. The best way I would describe what I have seen is Real World: Star Trek Academy.
Clearly you don't know shit about the binning process.
And how would you know I didn't work in the semiconductor industry? You don't, do you? Presumptuous on your part, isn't it?
TSMC does the binning, Apple merely sets the definitions of each bin because they're the only customer of these chips. These binned A18s with a disabled core are sold to Apple at a cheaper rate than the normal full A18s.
No. TSMC sells wafers to Apple and everyone else. Pricing is computed at the water level. Yields are computed at the wafer level. There is no "cheaper rate" for binned A18s. They are either scrapped or repurposed. There may be an additional charge for packaging binned chips as were not part of the original computation of costs at the wafer level. It is in everyone's best interest that TSMC meet or exceed yield estimations.
These disabled core A18s are not manufactured on purpose. If they need to be manufactured on purpose then they lose the discount. If Apple buys full A18s and disables the core themselves they increase costs.
I have no idea what you are talking about "discount". Again, the chips are either scrapped or repurposed. Again, Apple and everyone else buys wafers from TSMC. They do not buy individual chips. The additional cost for binned chips is due to binned chips not being factored in the original contract.
It's great that Apple finds a use for what are otherwise defective chips. HOWEVER, devices that depend on a binned defective chip like this are limited to whatever TSMC's rate of defective chips are in relation to the total orders of real A18s
Again, are you advocating that Apple not use these chips and have them scrapped? It seems you are arguing both sides at the same time. Complaining that Apple is using chips they couldn't use and praising Apple for using chips they couldn't use.
Let's say 20% of all A18s end up needing to get one core disabled and the other 80% are as perfect as they can be. Now let's say Apple orders 1 million A18s. TSMC must produce 1.25 million chips, because 250k of them will end up binned as 5 core. Apple does not immediately just get these as part of their order. Apple may now buy the binned 5 cores at a cheaper rate, however, they are limited to just the 250k until they also order more A18s. And they were already using the 5 core A18s for other devices, so now they're spreading them extra thin.
You are speculating on the actual terms of these contracts based on your unknown metrics: Number of good chips. Number of wafers is used is because that is concrete. TSMC agrees to make so many wafers at a certain price with yield as a metric.
Factorials were someone's attempt to make math LOOK exciting.
