From d4c82465230178c3ed9089d7a62eaecdb6b95aef Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: 1337 h4xx0r <1337.h4xx0r@localhost>
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2023 08:07:14 +0000
Subject: Meh
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+ Andrew Yu's Personal Articles
+ https://www.andrewyu.org/#articles
+ Rants, opinions, technical stuff, all mixed together
+ vim
+
+
+
+
+
+ Affirmative Action
+ https://www.andrewyu.org/article/affirmative-action.txt
+ Sat, 08 Jul 2023 14:14:28 +0000
+
+ 21
+ <pre>Subject: Affirmative Action
+From: Andrew Yu <andrew@andrewyu.org>
+Message-Id: <CTWUQHND92OE.31YJ2FM2GHPTB@andrewyu>
+Date: Sat, 08 Jul 2023 14:14:28 +0000
+Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
+X-Mailer: aerc 0.14.0
+X-Article-ID: 21
+
+(Slightly modified for "publication")
+
+Here is my attempt at the Harvard/UNC affirmative action question,
+though I can't guarantee it's comprehensive, objective or developed, and
+the language here is deadly plain. Be aware that there's a fair bit of
+ethics, political philosophy and (minimal but still) US politics ahead.
+Also, since I'm Asian myself (of course, disadvantaged under the AA
+policies), perhaps I'm biased.
+
+Firstly, let me declare my unconventional "stance". I believe that
+affirmative action based on race is generally useless and may backfire;
+however if I were a supreme court justice, I would vote with the
+Liberals, to not interfere with the affirmative action policies of the
+universities.
+
+I'll start with why I believe that the court shouldn't interfere with
+the universities' policies. Harvard and UNC are private universities.
+They have their own ideals, and as long as they're not causing active
+harm to society (in my opinion, that'd be violating other people's
+negative liberty in the traditional interpretation by Isaiah Berlin--I am
+aware that there are paradoxes but it's the closest to a consistent
+theory of political philosophy that I can reach for now). Simply
+speaking, the students they admit is irrelevant to the government/state.
+If we consider public universities on the other hand, then sure. The
+government funds them, is supposed to set their goals and policies, and
+is responsible for their admissions and could rightfully implement
+policies that they see fit, but for private educational institutions, my
+"small government" mindset comes in.
+
+However, there are interesting arguments surrounding how "elite"
+universities such as Harvard, and to some extent UNC, have substantial
+social impact on society, as they are more or less a standard in
+defining tertiary education in the US and globally. Other educational
+institutions may follow their policies in attempts to bring themselves
+to the prestigious "standard" that elite institutions set, these elite
+universities are crucial in educational mobility, there might be
+potential public investment, etc. However I still intuitively think that
+the government shouldn't intervene, perhaps because of how in the US,
+court cases set precedents, and a precedent of such intervention would
+"allow" for government expansion and potential for the government to dip
+their feet into more private business.
+
+Now I'll briefly argue why I believe that affirmative action based on
+race is generally useless and may backfire. There are three main reasons
+that I could think of for affirmative action, I'll describe my opinion
+on each, one by one.
+
+First, that affirmative action promotes diversity. I (personally) think
+that diversity is an insufficient reason to be potentially racially
+discriminating (people with the same academic capability may be
+rejected/admitted based on racial quotas, which may be considered a form
+of discrimination based on factors that they couldn't control).
+
+Second, that affirmative action adjusts for educational inequality. I
+haven't fact-checked this, but perhaps it's true that African-Americans,
+on average, live in poorer communities and have lesser access to good
+secondary education. Therefore their grades cannot fully reflect their
+academic potential, and universities admissions should compensate for
+that. Now aside from how this feels patronizing, race is no longer a
+good measure of "lack of educational resources due to financial
+situations/etc", with the existence of quite affluent African-American
+families. Affirmative action (if any) for
+educational-inequality-adjustment could be better implemented by looking
+at education and financial situations themselves, not race.
+
+Third, that affirmative action compensates for past wrongs. Having what
+people's ancestors do affect them negatively present-day feels awkward,
+although arguably people benefitting from the achievements of their
+ancestors means that they also need to take relevant responsibilities.
+
+Anyways, here are my thoughts, a bit incomplete but might be
+interesting. Cheers!
+</pre>
+
+
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- Hardware Oligopolies and the Decentralization of Hardware Production
-
-
-
-
-
-
Hardware Oligopolies and the Decentralization of Hardware Production
-Here are my thoughts on the current situation on the oligopoly of the
-CPU and general technology market.
-
-Many markets, especially the computer hardware market down to the basics
-such as the architecture/chipset-like level, are Economics of Scale,
-meaning that the cost of production per unit decreases as the total
-number of production for one entity. This naturally gives rise to
-oligopolies, also known in the technology industry as companies like
-Intel and Microsoft.
-
-An oligopoly is a market structure in which a market or industry is
-dominated by a small number of large sellers or producers. People often
-confuse this with monopolies, for which the latter Francis Wayland
-defines as ``an exclusive right granted to a [hu]man or a monopoly of
-[hu]man, to empoly their labor or capital in some particular manner'',
-which cannot exist in a free market (i.e. free of government
-regulations). The technology industry in most countries is an
-oligopoly, not a monopoly.
-
-The harm of oligopolys (and monopolies, which are similar in this
-context) are commonly discussed in Economics, such as the lack of
-competition causing prices to be solely in control of one economic
-entity, who may set insane prices in seek of profits, which is
-especially harmful for products that serve basic human needs, such as
-food and water. And in modern times, technology is often a necessity
-for daily life, exacebating the harms of a relevant oligopoly market.
-
-There is yet another practical harm of a oligopoly technology market:
-about the rights of users. When CPUs are produced by almost solely
-Intel, AMD, and a few others, they are now free to add their backdoors
-and ``management engines'' into the CPUs that we users use daily, and
-their seek for profit pushes them to do so. We now have to work with
-spyware in our computer hardware, and we can't do anything about it,
-because the oligopoly nature of the market doesn't allow us common
-people to monitor, produce, develop, or otherwise deal with our own
-technology except for the ``expected usages'' that the oligopoly
-superimposes on us.
-
-One way out is to decentralize the development and production of CPUs
-and related goods. Individual cities and towns should be able to
-produce computers, from the very basics, for their own people.
-And I know this sounds like an anti-internationalisation self-sustaining
-propaganda chiche economic outcome, but if you think about it, such an
-essential part of life (like technology) would be better served by
-people who'd be less likely to massively implement spyware that would be
-of any use to them.
-
-Initiatives to decentralize development of CPUs and other computer
-components, such as LibreSilicon, have existed for a short time (in
-comparison to the time that Intel and AT&T have existed). We're nowhere
-near what Intel could make, however, partly due to the insane patents
-around their technology. Patent trolls exist and often target free
-software and free hardware projects, and thus applying the idea of
-copyleft as it works for copyright, to patents, may aid practical
-development. And at this point, we can't really develop upon existing
-foundations, so we have to ignore pre-existing knowledge and develop our
-own architecture and CPU from the start, paying attention to copyleft
-licenses and copyleft-in-patents to hopefully prevent patent trolls from
-taking over the world again. (This is also what the Evosaur project is
-attempting to do.)
-
-Please tell me your thoughts on this.
-
Pages for other projects (i.e. Evosaur) are not listed—only independent articles are listed here. These are sorted from newest to oldest. Some do not come with HTML anchors: these articles are not published online, but are still listed here. For these, you may ask me for a copy in real life, but it is within my rights to decline such requests. Note that if an article ID has an asterisk (*), it is considered fiction and its meaning shall not be interpreted literally.