corimaith

It's interesting how genre coding have become much more enforced these years. Back in the early 2010s we would call most of these just "sci-fi", because the influence and aesthetics of cyberpunk has already bled into the wider genre that you'd be more hard pressed to find a story without some influence on it.

But despite the author's veneration of 90s and 2000s, I'd argue the works from the late 2000s and early 2010s are just as sophisticated and arguably more relevant to our modern world; Project Itoh (Genocidal Organ, Harmony), Gatchaman Crowds, Beatless, alot of their themes were prescient; Because the frontier isn't hardware, it's ontology and semantics.

This is wrong. Ma was put down because of a speech he made attacking the banking system as outdated and needing reform. It was the P2P lending given that the whole thing was the government's own initiative from the late Li Keqiang and they approved the IPO right till the speech.

The mismanagement here was actually Microsoft giving studios free reign and they flopped with projects like Starfield. This needs to be understood really within the larger industry trend of quality decline of AAA, which I suspect has to do with changes in overall dev culture and discourse than corporate decisions. There hasn't been a time when developers have been more disconnected from their audience than now.

Or you could just use a CNN...

Reality is messy. But they are the ones at least thinking the most about this, and I'd say the coin is still overall weighted in their favour than listening to an uninformed opinion.

While it's not improbable to see some theoretical realized "sovereign" individual who can wholly run and own a civilization themselves as the sole master, that is ultimately the logical progression of the empowerment of the individual through Modernism, which we have signed up for as opposed to hunter-gatherers.

You could replace AI with Advanced Education or Automation or Transhumanism really and get the same result, but I don't think there is really a "solution" beyond either staying as pets or catching up as an individual.

But at the same time, even if the rich become completely autonomous to the rest in some walled enclave, that would just resolve to the unemployed all just creating their own parallel economy again. You might loose much of the inheritance of wealth and infrastructure from the preceding civilization, but then again the preceding civilization's own norms that legacy was owned by the rich, so it's just returning back to basics.

The generation of elites fostered by academic "meritocracy" have little achievements and clearly are unable to solve or even perceive modern problems. In contrast, those who were fostered in closed patronage networks navigated their countries in times of great uncertainty and built many of the institutions we rely on today.

You know a statement like this just makes Chinese big tech look bad right?

You could also replace AI with (Proper) Education and get the same logical conclusion. The wealthy would be able to access future advanced pedagogical techniques that would equalize the advantages of both talent and hard work in a post-competence future.

But a post-competence future is ultimately a good thing for humanity. There is no inherent reason why somebody who is talented or skilled in the specific abilities that society deeems necessary should be privileged if those needs can now be automated. It just sounds more like an arbitary class deemed the "skilled" complaining about the loss of their elite status against another, more entrenched elite class relying on wealth. But as a commoner, why should I favour the meritocrats who look down on me over the wealthy who might be more magnanimous in understanding their privilege?

Whataboutism doesn't save your argument about Iran "respecting international law" being proven wrong.

The thing with war is that once you have it for a certain amount of time, you create a generation of people whose kids died, wife died, neighbors and family died, you have nothing to loose anymore.

You... didn't learn history from before 1945 did you?

Iran was NOT bombing its neighbours and demanding Hormuz toll before the war. Not even after it was bombed last June.

They were funding and arming proxies that were bombing and destabilizing neighborhoods. Nobody in the region likes Iran, that is precisely why the Gulf States want US bases and a Israeli military pact.

And this is not a reactive policy as it is an explicit proactive policy of exporting the Islamic Revolution and gaining regional hegemony. Which no one wants.

Iraq is many things but its not a puppet dictatorship, if anything it suffers from too much democracy in secterianism.

That's only if you continue to assume vulnerable and unfortified critical infrastructure. Did you know the majority of damage from a nuke is more from the aftermath of the blast in fires and crumbling infrastructure than the blast itself. And that can be adequately prepared for one if one needs to.

9060 is mid-tier, buying a 9800X3D and DDR6 RAM is overkill because the GPU won't keep up with their performance.

AMD has no equivalent to NVidia in the high end, it isn't tax as it is functional monopoly

A 5080 is 1.5K, A 5090 is even more. 1600 to 2000 is not really a large difference at the price band where you are spending that much money, especially since you would heavily comprising in other components if you want to keep that budget, in which that case you don't need 32gb RAM.

That is to say, if you want a system that keeps up with 32 GB Ram, you'd be already willing to spend alot what with options for noctua fans, water cooling, higher end MOBOs, premium cases, OLEDs etc. If you can't afford that then you won't be buying expensive DDRD5 RAM either.

I find the panic over RAM prices to be overestimated. 32GB DDR5 RAM is around $500 which is comparable to to the 9800x3D. Sure it sucks that it increases by around 4x, but when you factor in the overall price of a top end PC at around 1000-2000, especially for the lion's sum of the GPU, the increase is marginal.

This only effects a very narrow slice of highly budget conscious consumers trying to build high end PCs at razor thin margins.

I wouldn't say he mismanaged but clearly his strategy wasn't working, although I'm not sure if there was a path to a better outcome.

The problem was the lack of hit IPs, and buying a bunch of studios with good histories like Bethesda was on the surface, a logical choice. The problem is that the Western AAA industry was also undergoing through a general decline amidst a larger cultural shift that was anathemic to originality, so no new hits could be made.

Nintendo and Sony in contrast still had a portfolio of more niche legacy studios like Monolith or Atlus or Kojima that could create new things. Obviously the talent for that does exist in the West, from Larian or smaller indie studios, but it is very hard for upper management to discern these kinds of details or be willing to take the risk with them.

Unless if you plan on eating cheap kebabs or inauthentic asian food, a good meal in london is gonna cost you at least 20 pounds

To add on this, ethnic heterogeneity (and ethnic enclaves) is one of the shallowest forms of diversity. If you examine the diversity regarding district characteristics and architecture, shopping options, subcultures, etc, many homogenous cities like Tokyo or Hong Kong are far greater and accommodating than London in diversity.

And I would say that one reason for that is the elements I mention is something an individual can take seriously and integrate into their own world, while enclaves stay perpetually from the vantage of exoticism rather than integration.

High end PC parts are literally the cheapest in the world in USA. Its the opposite of overinflated. The 9800x3d is 479 USD, but 3800 Yuan in China.

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.

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.

This looks to be slowly changing for various reasons.

Well, not really, because obviously that deprecation via buying government treasuries is balanced by the appreciation in the other currencies. But if everybody (large enough to matter) dosen't want their currency to appreciate, if somebody buys Japanese bonds for example to weaken their own currency, then Japan will buy somebody else's treasuries to offset the increase in Yen, and if we go to the long chain of musical chairs of people offsetting each other's behaviours, it just leads back to the USA as the only ones both large enough and willing to take in those capital inflows.

That's not a interpretation mind you, that's a description of what central banks are doing right now. If that has to change, you need somebody willing to take the mantle of the absorber of global deficits, and nobody wants to do that.

And who takes its place?

Anybody who can (EU, Yuan) does not want to. Primairly because as export based economies, they want a weak currency in relation to a strong reserve (dollar) so they can make their goods more competitive, and also because surplus naturally appreciates a currency without central bank intervention via buying US treasuries to offset the appreciation. And for China, they're not going to accept the liberalized capital controls neede for it either.

So the answer is if the US dollars fail it would be global economic collapse and then chaos, but contrary to the rhetoric the rest of the world's economic systems are too uniquely vested in the USD to see it fail. As for gold, well we come to the same problem as noted above but worse, and in that situation the US actually holds the highest gold reserves so they still benefit the most out of it.

You do realise it is arthimetically impossible to balance all the desired export surpluses of the EU, China, Japan, etc together without the US as the demand sink right? Whatever adjustment comes is certainly going to require somebody to act in a manner contrary to their current strategies, and it's going to be a painful adjustment.

And which is harder? Bringing back production to satiate domestic demand or increasing domestic demand? Historically, demand deficiency is much harder to restore.

Literally every single one of Europe's prized industries are in the crosshairs of China's industrial ambitions.

The export driven economies like China or the EU rely on the dollar to weaken their own currencies for competitive trade. Without it, natural FX mechanisms would naturally begin to appreciate their currencies and make their exports uncompetitive.

Keynsian economists are in favour of reducing global imbalances. While tariffs are a crude and disruptive tool to achieve it, the US ultimately can unilaterally close the gap.

What is misleading is labeling a global system marked by large, persistent imbalances as benign or indicative of "free trade". A healthy free trade system should have balanced trade, and the reasons that are not are unfortunately the fault of surplus nations like China or the EU. I know, its unintuitive, but going back to Bretton Woods to IMF analysis will back this point.

P.S if one wants to note the grocery shop analogy, a better analogy is that if you count up all your transactions, your income should exceed your spending, or else you're probably in trouble. That's roughly the problem here, but made more complex with the shenanigans of the US dollar.

They didn't. In the Bakerloo line there is no coverage save for wifi on stations, not on tracks.