I do not know if China could find a better window to take Taiwan,
Big tech manufacturers are treating consumers like crap by selling chips and memory to over-invested start-up companies that will go bankrupt, as these products will not be profitable due to the high costs (the technology that would make them profitable does not exist and has not even been conceived), in addition to the low long-term quality of what they offer.
The thing is, right now, billions of consumers around the world see how those big tech manufacturers are not serving them the pieces they need, and that such techs will not do in the near future with fair prices (prices abuse escalation, the consumers lost their strength).
Right now, if China takes Taiwan, 2026-2027, even if they lose the fabs, the billions of consumers in this planet will see this as a real f** you big techs, f** you overinvested startups hoarding, go go China, as we realize that we are third category citizens in this "first the riches" spiral, and will be no much difference of what is going on now.
If China takes his media news cards right, and makes know the consumers this is a revolution, and combine it with one of the numerous Taiwan's corruption scandals, I bet they will not find the opposition from citizens around the world that they would find in a different period of time.
By "consumers" you mean by people buying top tier gaming PCs (and either without one already or unwilling to wait). That's far less than billions if not even millions than more like thousands.
Besides, if you want to optimize for pure consumerism, you can just look at how roman slavery worked out for roman freemen in the late republic.
> By "consumers" you mean by people buying top tier gaming PCs (and either without one already or unwilling to wait).
Good try. We are talking about a window of X years were the average normal consumer, average people, will not be able to buy tech, and should not buy tech, due the prices will put, has already put, average low-end technology at prices of extra mega top tier technology, anything with a memory or disk or CPU ( too expensive, this is an abuse, it is better to wait given the current terms).
This pause were the tech supply is not destined to the average consumer (who is being abused due this) is the perfect window for China to take Taiwan if they plan the strategy well.
And it is not needed even to predict, Chinese government just need to follow/observe the prices and discomfort, and if the pattern follows, it is the moment. The average consumer, the people, even will aim them.
The average normal consumer is buying Macs or some 700 dollar laptop. Even with the high end, you're talking about more like a 20-30% increase in total cost which is marginal at already low relative prices PCs are.
None of this is "unaffordable" as you say as it is just a month's worth of savings.
storage from $40 to $100, memory 16GB DDR4 from $67 to $190, 32GB DDR4 from $72 to $263, in the last six months. I other currencies the amount it from higher to much higher.
Average low-end technology at prices of extra mega top tier technology.
You are saying people will buy, and smile without resistance saving months to pay those abusive prices for low-end tech, even knowing this is because four or five companies are hoarding the market. Take for sure people is really tired/sick of this, check the forums.
China, are you reading this? You should study this along the months. Then you can make your own conclusions.
Seems like China is entering every industry. This week they just launched their attempt to take over the ice cream market in the US. Its amazing to see how much overinflated every product in the US has become, everything from cars, to computers to now even freakin coffee or ice cream.
Imagine if China has a foothold in every industry. Sure the US can tariff itself but the rest of the world is not really competing in most of those industries and so consumers will be able to see that they dont have to settle for overpriced junk anymore. What will American/European or even other sian companies do? In America most companies have financialized so much that the underlying product that made the company famous have rotten in quality.
I recently was blown away Laifen's P3 Pro electric razor. I always thought I would be a loyal Panasonic customer for life (since I had family work for the company) but here comes this Chinese company from nowhere and they produce such an amazing device at an amazing price. I never thought having a CNC milled pocket razor using some sort of tiny linear motor would be something I would want but now I can't see life without it.
They are doing it to every industry. I always accepted things like 3D printers were gone thanks to Bambu but I now have to consider every industry at risk.
Give them some time. CXMT put some downward pressure on RAM and the recent price spikes is their opportunity. In terms of GPUs, that is something I haven't been following but given every other layer of the stack has a Chinese company, I would be shocked if they aren't cooking something up.
The output of the prompts always needs peer review, scrutiny. The longer is the context, the longer it will deviate, like if a magnet were put nearer and nearer to a navigation compass.
This is not new, as LLMs root are statistics, data compression with losses, It is statistically indexed data with text interface.
The problem is someones are selling to people this as the artificial intelligence they watched at movies, and they are doing it deliberately, calling hallucinations to errors, calling thinking to keywords, and so on.
There is a price to pay by the society for those fast queries when people do not verify such outputs/responses, and, unfortunately, people is not doing it.
I mean, it is difficult to say. When I hear some governments are thinking in to use LLMs within the administrations I get really concerned, as I know those outputs/responses/actions will nor be revised nor questioned.
<< Danish troops told to 'shoot first, ask questions later' if US invades Greenland. The European nation's rules of engagement requires soldiers to “immediately” counter-attack invading forces without awaiting orders. >>
Nowadays I think packages should turn to portable applications isolated within their own directories. Those directories would have an standard libraries directory that the application would use.
Latter, if desired, the system, could override those libraries with another ones (newer compatible or patched), more thinking is needed about this. The key, from the process point of view, would to limit the access of such process to their own directories and some very limited system only local services by default,
And to extend this permissions, each binary in such directory would need to be in companion of a permissions request file that would require the approbation from the user or the system defaults patterns (each distro would have a point of view I guess), in the aim of improve process isolation and system, drivers, services access permissions.
This would need also restructure the console philosophy, how can manage the processes, and so on, that would need a big restructuration.
I mean, anyway people is duplicating space with containers trying to isolate process, remark in trying.
I know this is unrealistic due the deep change it would suppose, so consider I'm just thinking out loud.
PS: If you answer it already exists with AppArmor, SELinux, etc, then you did not understood the root of the issue with such modules.
Some basic permissions like Android, but the rest would need to be lower level, more like the configuration file of a firewall with intrusion detection system, let say, to use io_uring needing explicit permissions, the access to some memory regions, and so on.
US would be isolated with sanctions, EU may join to the BRICS (or a partial homologous?).
So I'm not sure if the above is his main intention, or if he is telling Greenland to join the EU (altruism? hmmm), or if we're witnessing how he sent his businesses bankrupt [1] , or if I'm missing something.
Trump specialises in sending his businesses, hotels and casinos bankrupt, to the point banks stopped lending him money, so he turned to the Russian oligarchy for funding.
We are talking about an senary were the market and energy importation from US finish, that would push EU toward the East, Are you sure we will not return to Russia to supply that energy?
Or with other words, Do you think that what happened to the unfortunate Uranians is not related to cut Russian oligarchy tentacles over the EU through energy supply?
The oil production there is completely decimated. They have huge reserves but production is low and falling because the regime doesn't do any maintenance or support of anything in the oil production and supply chain. It is very much the meme of "living in the ruins of a once great society".
Completely dishonest answer. Sanctions decimated Venezuela's ability to maintain its oil infrastructure. Everything, from machined parts, to the various chemicals needed, everything, was affected.
It just took a few years for the sanctions to bite, as the Venezuelans conserved & used stockpiles.
Again, a completely dishonest take. Speaks volumes, when most defenders of todays criminality keep spouting arguments to this effect.
Venezuelan oil production was cratering years before the first oil sanctions because they replaced everybody who knew how to drill oil with loyalists. I didn’t realize this was debatable.
>While reports circulated that Ms. Rodríguez was in Russia at the time of the attacks, Ms. Rodríguez is in Caracas, according to three people close to her. Russian state media also denied reports that she was in Moscow.
(Permalink, since it's on the second page of the live thread now.)
This live format is kind of irritating. Here's another one:
> He claims the oil business in Venezuela has been a "bust", and that large US companies are going to go into the country to fix the infrastructure and "start making money for the country"
You made the mistake of believing that Trump is more than a zero step thinker. Many do.
The fact is, his tactics and plans end where his nose does.
Many of his advisors are capable of planning, but there are times he just doesnt listen to them and lets whatever heavy metals are in the spray tan do all the thinking. See January Sixth for one example that got people killed. See USAID for another.
On the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, I don't think this administration would have bothered to talk to China at all. I don't think they need to.
China isn't giving up any barrels of oil. It's a global market. If Venezuela is selling 5 million bbl per day to China, and it stops selling to China, someone else will start buying it. Since they are now buying 5 million bbl per day from Venezuela, that means they are buying 5 million bbl / day less from their existing suppliers. China will buy that oil.
Although that doesn't seem like much of a solution though: the press will be bored of this by the end of the week and the only news that can come out is bad news.
Today. She's still part of the same regime and party. It's not obvious Trump will let her stay in charge. Also the control the government had over the criminal gangs/syndicates/cartels was seemingly very weak anyway. Even if the current decapitated regime is allowed to stay it won't be very strong.
The US has long recognized Edmundo González as the rightful president of the country following the 2024 election. I imagine they will try to install him.
Alternatively there's María Corina Machado who overwhelmingly won the presidential primary for that election but wasn't allowed to run.
I am not sure what you mean by "control the government had"...they are the same thing. It is like the situation with IRA and Sinn Fein, this bizarre roleplay where people (for various reasons) went to massive effort to imply they were separate when it was obvious they were led by the same people. There is no distinction between the government and cartels...the assumption that there is makes no sense at all given the latitude they have to operate.
Low level officials can be eliminated through missile strikes.
If if had to guess, Maduro could have been take out with a GBU or two, but the US holds a grudge against him so they took him out to humiliate him, and send a message to others.
There's a big international diplomacy difference between assassinating a leader and forcibly extraditing one on drug charges.
Not too many countries will go to the mat to support a leader who was engaged in narcotics trafficking, if the US is able to present a viable case (which they seem to intend to, if he's being charged in US federal court).
I'm skeptical, as it seems to have that ring of circa-2003 WMD justification about it, but I won't dismiss it out of hat.
And if the US intends to prosecute Maduro on drug crimes in SDNYC (good!), then they'll have to present evidence to the court, which presumably means they think they have a case.
Personally, I doubt Maduro intentionally ran a narco-state as a primary focus. But I can very much see a sizable narcotics enterprise, with state support, being used as a key way for him to enrich select supporters absent a viable economy. Money to pay the generals has to come from somewhere...
You can't credibly pardon one massive drug dealer and then go and kidnap the head of state of another country based on the same kind of thing. The lack of consistency alone should cause some serious headscratching.
Headscratching is not an international consequence.
"Right" rarely matters in geopolitics.
What matters is who opposes a course of action, and how far they're willing to go in their opposition.
Is China or the UK going to insist that former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández be prosecuted on drug crimes? If not, then the US is realpolitik free to do what it wants.
Similarly with Maduro. Who's going to support him? And how far are they prepared to go?
> > Pardoning a different drug dealer can be a way to show Maduro that they were serious about the offer, that they really would have gone easy on him.
Maduro is not a drug dealer and even if it was not directing all the limited resources of its government to stop the drug trade we are talking about allocation of resources which should have happened in order to put Americans Interests first whereas Venezuela has so many other serious problems.
Also even if all that was true we are talking about cocaine, the party (and somewhat productivity) drug.
The fentanyl is produced 10,000 miles away from Venezuela, in CHYNA which used to be a great talking point in 2016 but of course nothing ended up happening
It's possible to imagine all kinds of fantastical explanations but usually the simplest one is the correct one: Trump is receiving bags of money for the pardon. Also bolstered by his past (and ongoing) behaviour of openly and shamelessly enriching himself at every opportunity.
You could do whatever is good for your country. Credibly.
Getting rid of a head of state that brings your primary competitors (china) influence to your doorstep is not head scratching. Just try to think in real-world terms
Things are complicated. As a policy, I wouldn’t want to encourage grandma to be going to any web site to download software. Grandma should probably stick to the App Store. And personally, I would way rather install github builds than downloads from ‘official’/independently maintained web sites. Especially in the case of free / open source projects, sometimes cash constrained. Security is hard.
I’m not super knowledgeable about modern video players- I do like Infuse, which is in the App Store.
You need to know previously the word to write from Hepburn to Kana when "ō" is present because data is lost in such transliteration from おう or おお or オー to Hepburn.
The internet is full of romanji written incorrectly with "o" alone when it should be "ou" or "oo" due "ō" ASCII conversion errors at one moment.
(The sooner a beginner embrace Hiragana and Katakana, the better)
you create money based on debt, and eternal growth, and devalue savings, and force people to bet in order to try to preserve savings value, then each ten or fifteen years you allow someones to harvest the rewards of the casino.
And when population start to decrease (on developed countries), you rise the alarm, "more population is needed due to the decline in the birth rate", promoting an eternal growth that would need the resources several planets if everyone had a decent standard of living.
Big tech manufacturers are treating consumers like crap by selling chips and memory to over-invested start-up companies that will go bankrupt, as these products will not be profitable due to the high costs (the technology that would make them profitable does not exist and has not even been conceived), in addition to the low long-term quality of what they offer.
The thing is, right now, billions of consumers around the world see how those big tech manufacturers are not serving them the pieces they need, and that such techs will not do in the near future with fair prices (prices abuse escalation, the consumers lost their strength).
Right now, if China takes Taiwan, 2026-2027, even if they lose the fabs, the billions of consumers in this planet will see this as a real f** you big techs, f** you overinvested startups hoarding, go go China, as we realize that we are third category citizens in this "first the riches" spiral, and will be no much difference of what is going on now.
If China takes his media news cards right, and makes know the consumers this is a revolution, and combine it with one of the numerous Taiwan's corruption scandals, I bet they will not find the opposition from citizens around the world that they would find in a different period of time.
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