thworp

A toy example: NeoCloud Inc builds a new datacenter full of the new H800 GPUs. It rents out a rack of them for $10/minute while paying $6/minute for electricity, interest, loan repayment, rent and staff.

Two years later, H900 is released for a similar price but it performs twice as many TFlOps/Watt. Now any datacenter using H900 can offer the same performance as NeoCloud Inc at $5/month, taking all their customers.

[all costs reduced to $/minute to make a point]

You simply cannot compare the experience of being conquered in a pre-modern society to being conquered by the PRC.

Premodern States simply couldn't afford the level of oppression and exploitation that is possible today. They usually just replaced the upper layers of the old hierarchy, put some small garrisons in a few places and left most local elites in charge, often with their local armies. If there was an organized rebellion, there would usually be a a few skirmishes and then a re-negotiation of the terms.

Today even Morocco could afford to turn Western Sahara into a territory with total surveillance, checkpoints everywhere and an impenetrable wall in the desert while slowly ethnically cleansing the native population.

Look for a broad-strokes summary of environmental laws in China [0]. Note the following paragraph:

The standards detailed in the action plan focus on several harmful substances, including particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Each of these pollutants has defined permissible levels, which are critical in guiding both regulatory authorities and industries in their compliance efforts. Over the years, the Chinese government has intensified its efforts to monitor real-time air quality and ensure adherence to these standards

Now try to reconcile this with the actual air quality [1] [2]. Note that September is far from the peak, when it gets cold and dark the air quality in many megacities becomes off-the-charts toxic.

This leaves two possibilities: either the state is too weak or too corrupt to enforce these laws. Since the PRC is far from weak and its organs are very powerful, this only leaves one possibility.

[0] https://generisonline.com/an-overview-of-pollution-control-a...

[1] https://aqicn.org/map/china/

[2] https://www.windy.com/-Air-quality-index-aqi?cams,aqi,40.255...

The situation in China is actually even worse. There are environmental regulations, but enforcement is easily evaded through bribes or CCP connections. Every so often there is a disaster that forces the government to start a much-publicized campaign. A few of the worst or least connected offenders get punished and then it's back to business as usual.

So really, if you're just anybody and start polluting, you'll quickly be stopped. Meanwhile the state-owned steel mill next door has been blasting out unfiltered coal exhaust for decades.

Imo OLED has completely eclipsed CRT by now.

I don't know enough to say where CRTs could be today if they had gotten the development $ that went into other tech. But to be as good as OLEDs they would have had to find something else than phosphor as the inner coating.

For response times, CRT will always remain the king of dark-to-light response times, but afterglow for bright-to-dark would always be a factor unless a different coating was developed. OLEDs have no such issues. Subjectively, the claimed < 0.1 ms response times are real and there are zero artifacts, no afterglow, no ghosts, just extremely sharp and defined motion.

A big issue with fingerprint-only devices is water. If your finger, the reader or both are sufficiently wet, most readers just don't work. Most touchscreens also don't work too well in those conditions - certainly not well enough to enter a secure alphanumeric unlock code - but enough to pull up a map.

I've had my old iPhone 7+ turn into a charged brick multiple times in the rain. Never happened with the faceID phones.

Actual support from the people was not wanted or needed by these regimes. They were content with having support by their party lapdogs, the kinds of people with no skills or personality, that would inform on their peers and magically become the factory's overseer. Those people owed everything to the system and they were the key to it continuing.

Everyone else was just kept in line. They set up both positive and negative incentives. Be neutral and you can live an OK life. Be a good communist and you can climb socially. Meet your West German uncle too often, or don't show up to the Labor Day parade and get a threatening talk. Actually voice your opposition to the regime and you may well find yourself in a Stasi torture prison.

Socialist doctrine said that socialism would be so good that people would soon(TM) embrace it organically. Of course they didn't, because it never delivered on anything and some western media still made it behind the iron curtain. Seeing a western supermarket shelf while you had to bribe someone to get spare parts for your washing machine is stronger than any propaganda.

Where structural bricks are used, they are generally hollow with air cavities of varying sizes. Those types of bricks are very good insulators, pretty much the best insulation we had before modern fibres. Even if we used solid brick, their thermal mass alone would help regulate interior temperatures.

The sino-vietnamese was a ridiculous mistake for the socialist project, that I agree with. But this wasn't an imperial war.

Fair enough, but then you can't claim that the US involvement in Korea was imperial.

When I mentioned modern China, I referred to the PRC, so after (most of its) national reunification.

Why do you set this as a cut-off? Is an empire no longer imperial once it has conquered all its provinces? Besides that, what happened in Hong Kong? Was that not an Empire aligning its rebellious province by force?

I fail to see how anti-terrorist repression in Xinjiang is akin to any form of imperialism.

I was mostly referring to the many purges between 1949 and 1976. While most of the millions killed in them were Han Chinese "class enemies", not pro-independence ethnic minorities, it was nonetheless part of the central committee solidifying total control of the country.

Since you mention it though, I'll just ask you: Are the various Uyghur councils and international NGOs just covering for terrorists? Did they fake all those official documents and the satellite pictures? How can you handwave what is happening in Xinjiang, yet be so concerned with Palestine? If you want to engage in some victim blaming, were the daily rocket attacks not terrorism?

There is Tibet, which had declared independence in 1913 and then decisively split itself from China by expelling all Chinese in 1945. The PRC conquered them because they were part of the Chinese "motherland". You can argue that the communist were the lesser of two evils (I would agree), but you can't argue this wasn't an imperial conquest.

The situation in the rest of China is a lot more complex. Most of warlords joined the PRC (sometimes through negotiation, mostly through surrender) when it was clear that the ROC - the competing but less centralized imperial power - had lost. The program of Han settlement, Sinicization and ethnic repression that occured in multiple waves (most acute in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and some areas of SW China) was an imperial project.

Externally, there is the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979. While the reasons for the conflict were multi-faceted, one of them was that Vietnam had broken Cambodia out of the Chinese sphere by deposing the Khmer Rouge.

Recently China has been building bases and shaping countries' economies and political systems around the world. Arguably they have already made the Solomon Islands a protectorate and a few African countries are also moving in that direction.

Which imperial power? If the US is an imperial power for defending their local dictator, how is PRC not one for doing likewise? Is it because the Communist empires loudly screamed that they‘re anti-imperialist as they went out and conquered their empires?

I think you went into stable genius territory yourself in the second half.

I'd guess Ukraine falls within months at most.

Even if the US stops all deliveries -- which is far from certain, judging by the noise Trump made in the past week -- Ukraine won't run out of supplies. They'll keep trading territory and even if that accelerates, it will take a long time to reach Kiev (which isn't guaranteed to lead to capitulation anyway, Ukrainians are pretty determined). Meanwhile it looks like Russia is running out of armaments itself and the domestic situation is heating up such that another mobilization is quite risky.

Pooh Bear is laughing too and will probably try to invade Ukraine.

This is a laughable suggestion. Sure, if Russia annexes parts of Ukraine, China will gladly send construction and mining crews for a friendly price and a cut of the profits, but they have absolutely no reason to send soldiers to Ukraine. In the first place it is not their conflict. They are only "allied" to Russia until they can fully bring Central Asia under their control and build up the infrastructure to replace Russian hydrocarbons and raw materials. Sending the PLA also runs the risk of exposing their weakness, which would damage China's position in the region. Much better to keep it as the huge threat it is on paper.

Did I mention that US antipiracy efforts are likely being strongly cut which means world shipping is going to get a lot more dangerous, expensive, and unreliable?

Yes, but the PLN is more than ready to take up this role. They have the bases, the ships and have been training like mad. Since freedom of navigation is very important to China (for now), we might see some strange bedfellows there.

In the long term, yes. In the medium term, companies and people liquidating their assets and paying capital gains tax actually gives the state a windfall.

You look out the window and see rain. I see light drizzle. A journalist writes about meeting a subject of his article in a "raging autumn storm".

especially on unrealised gains.

Right, absolutely brilliant idea. You live prudently, save some money every month and invest it (stocks, bonds, whatever). Due to factors entirely outside your control like a stock market bubble or an interest rate drop, the $50k portfolio you built over 30 years is now worth $70k. Your unrealized $20k gain is taxed at 10% for easier math. You don't have $2k cash on hand and are forced to sell some of your portfolio to pay the tax.

Next year, there is a crash. You now have just $40k in assets. But there is a gradual recovery, and the year after it's back to $50k. You now owe another $1k. Sound good?

How could they make sure that the CRISPR payload survives replication?

On the move 20% picaridin repellent works well to almost completely prevent bites. It's also slightly more long-lasting than DEET and doesn't destroy plastics. It will still need re-application if you're sweating. Otherwise long sleeves, repellent on hands and a net over your head work well. The general rule is to not stand still for more than a minute - CO2 accumulation will draw in exponentially more of them. If you have to stop, look for a place that is naturally windy like ridge or a forest cutting.

At home / in camp, obviosuly put nets everywhere and turn off interior lights when opening doors. If there aren't too many mosquitoes UV traps can make things bearable, but if you're near standing water at dusk you'll still get eaten alive.

I take it you have never spent any time outside where there's lots of them. If you go out without protection, they'll mercilessly sting every bit of exposed skin. Depending on your genes and the mosquitoes', the stings can swell heavily. Some of them sting so deep that you cannot get rid of the itching and inflammation with a heat pen.

As soon as you stand still, you'll find yourself in thick cloud of the bastards within 20 seconds. If you use repellent (picaridine does work to keep them from stining but isn't exactly healthy), they will still buzz around you and slowly drive you mad. If you use netting, some get through the inevitable gaps and some will obviously get inside your tent/car/house when you open them.

The sound of thousands of them flying around you just triggers some primal revulsion. Around sundown, their activity gets so intense that it literally sounds like a drone, if they're a large variety it even sounds a bit like a distant hornet swarm.

All in all, I don't think we can become friends. But at least they're more pleasant than black flies and deer flies.

The business model is essentially the same as credit cards, but with "fees" instead of interest payments. That is to say, Klarna takes a commission from merchants and the rest of their income is from people who didn't pay on time.

It's much better to buy Puts (limited downside). The problem with buying them now is that you're way too late. By now the premiums are quite high, even for huge declines. If you bought a few batches at different strike prices expiring 2026 in 2021 you would be sitting on some serious profit now.

but I disagree that the progress has been tremendous.

There really is no argument that it hasn't. If we take a year between 1950 and 1970 as a baseline, there was a significant reduction in chronic malnutrition and the number and severity of famines -- both in absolute numbers as well as per capita.

it has remained about the same for about a decade

If your time horizon is the last 10 years then the picture is more mixed, yea.

There has been tremendous progress in terms of available calories, malnutrition and deaths to starvation globally [0]. I'd say opaque indices and relative measures are now gaining adoption by certain parties to help conceal that fact. Of course anyone suffering hunger is tragic, but things have decidedly improved (although sadly it has plateaued in Africa since 2010).

I can't really comment on the situation in India specifically, but just for some global context around stunted development, look at a chart of men's height [1]. Not having half your population stunted by malnutrition is a recent phenomenon.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-of-men-by-...

It's not just the OS itself, where some of the slowness can at least be explained by the silo-ed nature of development and the large amount of moving parts. But even when MS gives a small-ish team free reign and a fresh start, the software is just agonizingly slow and buggy.

An example: new PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/

The FancyZones "window snap" UI takes upwards of half a second to activate when dragging a window and the Zone Editor is at around 5s. All in all it is only very slightly less buggy than 3rd party tiling WMs like komorebic.

The PowerToysRun utility input is extremely variable, takes between 1 and 20(!) seconds. A lot of the plugins shipped with it simply don't work or have no suggestions/hints once you enter their prefix. The search relies on WindowsSearch, which is about 500x slower than https://github.com/sharkdp/fd and has not improved since Win7. Who cares, nobody ever searches for files, right? As a whole, PTRun is simply worse than https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher which uses the same UI kit as far as I can see. WTF?

We do have the technology to build HVDC cables from Iceland to Britain / Norway and we can expect the loss of this grid-to-grid interconnect to be < 5%. It's a different question entirely if it is feasible. It would be the longest sub-sea power cable ever, and the projected cost of $4 billion might be much too low.

In the current situation Europe would profit immensely by sending excess renewable energy to Iceland's pumped hydro and Aluminium smelters while using their geothermal baseload capacity. But in 15 years that might no longer be the case and by then the investment would not have paid off and there might be regret that the money wasn't spent on a different HVDC line like another North Africa - Europe link or Bulgaria - Caucasus (which has a lot of undeveloped hydro potential).

Hell, there are companies and families who supported the third Reich openly.

They were rich before world war 2, they were rich after and they are still rich today.

Yes, these families exist. But there is an equal amount of them that went to the poorhouse that you don't know about. Many German Nazis that got wealthy through stealing/grafting of Jewish businesses _did_ lose their assets. Others still stayed somewhat wealthy but are now just barely millionaires.

It's very easy to get fooled by survivorship bias, since it's only the companies and people that are still wealthy that get heavily covered. I don't think a publisher would accept a book like Nazi Billionaires about all the people that are no longer relevant at all.

edit: I have to say, I also think it's terrible that so many people could just go on like nothing happened. Doubly so for the bureaucracy, diplomats and judges -- both in Germany and the Axis collaborators.

But this is how the world goes. The only people punished for the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward or the Gulags were those caught up in internal purges. The new Syrian government threw a few of the worst people in Jail, but cannot dismiss everyone involved in the old system for practical reasons. The Architects and executors of British and Dutch "counter-insurgency" strategies to keep their colonies have Barracks named after them. I could go on with American examples but I think we all know.

I agree with you, but using the word corpo to describe a very old phenomenon of society does not add to your argument.

That problem is also ever-present for China. States like China never look like they are about to collapse until they do.

Briefly: earth‘s rotational axis had a different tilt, leading to completely different climate and weather systems behavior. Incidentally, before the green sahara period, the sahara was much larger than today.

But no big party supports reunification with the current Chinese government, at best they have it as a long term goal. The election results do not show what you're claiming.

An election result is not a single-issue poll and the current government supports the status quo anyway (just being fundamentally more open to dialogue). A clear majority of the opulation supports de-facto independence (the current status) or even formal independence [0].

[0] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2023/09/02/...