Aceticon

True.

It’s only JUST for the actual victims and their direct descendants to punish and get compensation from the aggressors and those supported them, nobody else.

That’s it.

That’s how far the Principle Of Justice sides with them.

For even those who were once victims, to hurt and take things from people whole unrelated to that past aggression is NOT JUST. In fact the Principle Of Justice now sides with those they hurt and harmed - in this situation it is they who are the agressors and the others who are the victims so it is they who should be punished and compensate their victims.

For people who bare no relation even to said past victims other than being born into the same ethnicity to hurt and take things from others is way, way worse. These people are pure aggressors in every sense of the word, the worst of the worst and per the Principle Of Justice deserving of the harshest kind of punishment. That they’re leveraging Racism to try and get cover from the past victimization of other people who share nothing with them other than ethnicity for their own victimization of others is just them adding a cherry of hypocrisy on the top of the shit cake of their evil-doing.

Well, that's the thing, it's not "their own", it's just people who happen to share the same religion as these shit-stains. Jews in Israel aren't even mostly descendants from people who were impacted by the Holocaust - most Jews who moved to Israel came from Russia and the Middle East, not Western Europe. More broadly "All Jews are the same" is always Racism, not just when used to claim there's some kind of problem with all Jews but also when used to claim there's some kind of quality of all Jews or that somehow the victimization of some Jews magically made victims of other Jewish people who were not the victims, are not family of the victims and didn't even know the victims.

Joining in and doing what their enemy is already doing and which they're been unable to stop, is literally the only way the US and the Trump Administration can claim they're winning anything in this war. It's also pretty much how the Far-Right in at least America and Britain does politics: if civil society momentum builds up in a direction which isn't at all something they started or even wanted, rush to the front of the crowd and shout "Follow me!". The thing is, it doesn't quite work at swindling people into thinking you're a great leader when you don't have a thoroughly captured Press conveniently "forgetting" that they didn't actually started it and spinning that as "leadership" of and the result as a "victory" for the Far-Right leader. So at least outside the US and in the context of their war against Iran the whole thing looks incredibly stupid, maybe even derranged, even will the "geniouses" at the White House think this will make America and Trump look like winning. PS: There is one take which makes them actually seem intelligent (in the kind of "intelligence" a low-level thief would display) - that the actual individuals in the Trump Administration, including Trump himself, are doing it purely to personally profit from front-running Trump's announcements. This would work but the returns would keep on getting smaller and smaller as the Market stops believing Trump's words and/or expecting that sufficient people believe them for his words to cause market movements.

In a normal giraffe the neck (and the legs) is long in order to be able to reach the leafs high up on trees, so it makes sense that in a giraffe centaur arms would be at a that would let them use theirs arms to help with that, which would either be higher up or, alternativelly, lower down but long enough that they can both reach the leaves above AND the ground below whilst standing up.

I have never heard or read of anybody saying that people should “Vote Trump because Kamala supports Israel” until this moment.

Alternativelly, they've just been competent in the execution of their less savory intelligence operations and thus not been caught doing something too outrageous. It makes a lot more sense for China to arrange an "overdose" than shoot somebody in the middle of a busy street in broad daylight from a car with diplomatic plates and a Chinese flag. Same for all other countries, by the way, though in Autocracies politicians have less to worry if the country ever gets caught murdering people in foreign soil than politicians in Democracies do (though, judging by a century of American murders, even those in supposed Democracies almost never have to worry about it)

What we're talking about is "The Great Game", not Tit-Tac-Toe.

On one side people shouldn’t get special treatment for things of their chosing - that’s just the Principle of fairness of treatment. Nowadays in modern countries with easy access to modern contraception, having kids is a choice. However given how for example in America there is a crack down on abortion, things are going backwards in this and having kids isn’t always a choice anymore, in which case it’s actually fair to more easilly accomodate people who have kids more than people who don’t. On the other side if a country wants to incentivise people to have children in order to, at minimum, avoid a fall in that country’s population, it makes sense to do things to make life easier for people when they have children such as providing free childcare.

*Cogito, ergo sum*

As a random person on the Internet I don't actually have anything to add but felt it would be nice to jump in.

Yet.

It very much depends on what you’re developing for. Back when I did server-side development (which almost invariably is targetting Linux servers), having Linux as my dev environment was much better if only because I could run parts (or even all) of our server code directly in my machine configured as a Dev Environment. However, for example, for Game Dev running Linux is much more of a problem because some tools are for Windows and you have to jump through hoops to make it run in Linux, if at all. If you’re doing development on internal frontend systems for use by the Business side of a non-Tech company, then Windows is almost certainly the best dev OS because the software is meant to run in Windows machines (as that’s what the Business runs, unless we’re talking about creative companies, in which case it will be Mac) so the very same reasons why Linux is better for server dev apply here for Windows - it way more straightforward to develop in a machine where you can directly test at least parts of the code within the OS it will be running in. Yeah, you can run virtual machines or deploy to a dev server, but that just adds extra steps and hence extra overhead for frequently done things like running small snippets of code whilst developing just to check it’s working as expected. Then there’s the whole big company vs small company side of things: big companies have dedicated IT Support people and those will naturally try to standardize things for the obvious reason that it’s way more effective (same thing in dev, by the way, good Technical Architects try to keep the number of programming languages used low because its generally more efficient to have libraries, frameworks, maintenance and hiring practices around a smaller number of languages than it is to do it for many languages) which in turn means that in large companies “everybody gets the same” is an almost unassailable policy except for top-level management.

I’ve worked in all sizes of companies, in various industries and 3 different European countries. In my experience it very much depends on the industry the company in, the division one is working in and the size of the company. Engineering types in an Engineering/Tech company using Linux isn’t at all unusual in smaller and mid-sized companies. Sales types or accounting, definitelly are using Window. Creatives tend to use Macs, mainly because the Adobe suite runs perfectly in it and the hardware is superior to PC hardware - designer types almost literally salivate at things like 4K monitors. Real startups (so, not mature Tech companies that try and still be startups) will definitelly have their devs running whatever they want, whist for example big financial institutions will have everybody on Windows, except perhaps top-level management if they’re quirky and prefer Mac for some reason or other. Then to this add that the kind of professional who not only prefers Linux but can actually say “bye, bye” if they don’t get it is almost certainly be a pretty senior Techie (say, a Senior Designer Developer) and even now those are pretty hard to find for a permanent employment position (you can’t replace those with AI or outsourcing, not even close, and in the path to such seniority many devs who keep on progressing eventually step into management instead of staying on the Technical career track) - outside a large company (were the hiring manager doesn’t have the pull to make it happen), it a pretty good idea to let them use whatever OS they want in their work machine, even if it has to be with the proviso that they won’t be getting any support for it from the IT Support group (which, trust me, they will be fine with). If a hiring manager has the pull for it and there are no regulatory reasons to make it be otherwise, it’s pretty dumb not to let a rare resource like a really senior dev use whatever the fuck they want on their work PC if that’s going to allow you hire/keep that person.

I think merelly “spends more per-person” is nowhere strong enough to really illustrate how bad things are.

For example, the United States spends more than TWICE per-person in Healthcare than the United Kingdom.

In fact judging by this it spends almost twice as much as the European country which has a 69% higher GDP per-capita - Luxembourg.

And even with such much higher spending levels, based on this healthcare outcomes are actually worse.

Healthcare in the US is world-beating by a large marge in how spectacularly inneficient it is.

Trump wanted to fuck children but he couldn't go there to do it in person so he remotelly had them fucked in bulk. If you don't think that's important enough to beat cancer research in getting funds then you're one of those people who doesn't want to make America great again. /s

In a Universal healtcare system, there is a monetary incentive for the autorities to make laws and regulations to prevent disease - prevention is a lot cheaper than fixing things after the damage is done. In a pure for profit healthcare system there is no such incentive for the autorities - in some ways, there might even be the opposite incentive, depending on the levels of Corruption and how much more profit the Healthcare sector can make if people are more sick: after all, when a country spends twice as much as a percentage of the GDP in Healthcare, that means there's a lot more money to be made in Healthcare, and private interests have an incentive to buy politicians and regulators to help them profit as much as possible. Beyond this there is also the whole "doing what's best for our people" incentive, which is the US is so weak that it doesn't even apply to some obviously bad things (for example, easy availability of guns, which is definitelly bad for people's health) much less to more subtle pathways to damage people's health such as unhealthy food.

Shouldn't have been an ally of the US and Israel.

Well that's a shame. I've been looking around for a replacement to my aged Samsung A6 (which has been given an extended life by replacing the factory ROM with something with less bloatware, but is still pretty limited in terms of memory) which is not a Surveillance Outpost for just who knows how many nations and just about any companies willing to pay the 3 cents of whatever for the data, and all the Linux and degoogled Android makers only have 10"+ ones, which are too big for my use case which carry a tablet on a coat or trousers back pocket when I'm going to be sitting down somewhere and waiting for something so that I can read books and maybe browse the internet on their free WiFi. Personally I would LOOOVE a small Linux tablet, but I'm OK with some kind of privacy respecting Android which isn't riddled with backdoors mandated by governments which have Information Courts issuing Secret Bulk Information Collecting Orders, like the US and the UK.

Guess I know which brand my next smartphone upgrade will be. If they did some nice 7" tablets too, that would be perfect.

Remember boys and girls, if the bomb falls from the sky either from a plane or ridding the nosecone of a missile or is shot from the barrel of a tank, that is never Terrorism, it's only Terrorism if it's otherwise.

Agreed. One single potentially good thing in the middle of bad things still adds to something bad. My point is that this shit is happening either way no matter how shit it all is, so if we can recognize and extract one good thing out of it at least on the other side we’ll have one good thing, whilst if we don’t, we’ll have nothing good at all.

The silver lining in all this is that when this bubble explodes we’ll probably have a glut in the supply of HDDs and SSDs, driving prices down. Just hold any plans to upgrade your hardware for a year or two and you’ll end up better of (for many it will even be a good exercise to wean oneself out of the Consumer Society’s mindless “instant gratification” impulses).

I, for one, applaud anything that helps destroy the current Intellectual Property system, Not the other things, though.

Access to entry level positions is pretty fucked up in this because whilst experts will recognized expertise, for anything but smaller companies candidates get filtered out by HR and those people have no fucking clue what expertise outside their domain looks like, so they use proxies for it such as “stamp of approval from higher education institution” so in big companies the candidates without such stamps of approval (or a pre-existing insider contact) never actually get to be evaluated by the domain experts who can recognize that expertise. That said, if a candidate don’t have at least some domain expertise (so, neither formal study nor having done anything in that area in their free time), sorry but somebody who has actually had the discipline to attend a learning institution and enough capability and domain knowledge to actually passed their exams and graduated is way more likely to be at least decent at it (no guarantee, but the odds are much better) than a random person who never did either. It’s only fair that if you haven’t invested in learning it in some way or other (not necessarily college) you’re not going be seen at the same level as somebody who has actually invested in learning that domain. It’s only naturally that some kind of expertise validation system for candidates emerges for any kind of domain were some level of expertise is required and as things stand now in most such domains at the entry level that’s colleges (which, IMHO, are better than cronyism-heavy “know somebody who knows somebody” systems), though in many domains something lighter and cheaper (some kind of cheaper test-only option) would probably be better (or, alternativelly, do as it’s done in civilized countries and have higher education be Public, so cheaper or even free).

Also having attended college and actually successfully passed its knowledge tests and graduated proves that you have both the discipline and mental capability for certain jobs. I’m in software development and have been part of the process of hiring people and from the point of view of an employer, for a candidate to an entry level position that college diploma is an indicator that the person in question has the knowledge and capabilities to do that kind of job. Mind you, in my area fortunatelly there are other ways to indicate that - for example, having participated in Open Source projects or, even better, having your own Open Source project with actual users that you’ve had to support (which in my view can put somebody above somebody else who merelly has a college diploma) - though that’s generally only for smaller companies since large ones will have HR filter candidates before the ever reach the actual domain experts and HR can’t judge skill like that and instead will go for “big formal stamp of approval” shit. That said, the college diploma stops being important after junior level, unless it’s one from a handful of very prestigious institutions and even then it won’t work on domain experts, only non-expert manager types.

“Computer says” is a pretty standard excuse for doing fucked up shit as it adds a complex form of indirection and obfuscation between the will of a human and the actual actions that result from that will. Doesn’t work as an excuse with people who actually make the software that makes the computer “say” something (because the complexity of what us used is far less for them and thus they know what’s behind it and that the software is just an agent of somebody’s will), but it seems to work with even non-expert (technology fan) techies, more so with non-techies. With AI the people using the computer as an excuse just doubled down on this because in this case the software wasn’t even explicitly crafted to do what it does, it was trained (though in practice you can sorta guide it in some direction or other by chosing what you train it with) further obscuring the link between the will of a human which has decided what it does (or at least, decided which of the things it ended up doing after training are acceptable and which require changes to training) and the output of a computer system. Considering that just about the entirety of the Justice System. Legislative System and Regulatory System are technically ignorant, using the “computer says” as an excuse often results in profit enhancing outcomes, incentivising “greed above all” people to use it to confuse, block or manipulate such systems.

Nowadays it’s filled with giant, powerful, activelly predactorial entities using teams of Psychologists to come up with ways to subvert human falibilities and weaknesses to their ends no matter how much it fucks up their victims. Back in the day pretty much the worst that could happen to you was getting hurt when trying to do for fun some kind of explosive based on a FAQ from Usenet. Back in the day it was like a sleepy village with some shady corners, nowadays its Blade Runner’s Los Angeles with the authorities trying to turn it into Mega City One.

Surely he at least knows the name of the one he used to carry around as a human shield after the Health Care Insurance CEO got executed?!

That's my point - it makes sense for high demand for GPUs and RAM to leak into lower supply and hence higher price for other high density microchips that use the same process and are made in the same fabs - something which your experience seems to confirm - but HDDs are mechanical magnetic storage devices were the only microchip is a pretty basic controller. HDDs are about as related to GPUs and RAM as power sources.

Punched Paper Quantum AI is the next Revolution in Computing! You heard it here first. Invest Now!!!

Unless things have changed recently LLMs don't really used slow data stores with very high capacity such as HDDs, at least not beyond the training stage. The prices that have been pushed up by AI are for GPUs and DRAM (price rises which in turn possibly feed onwards to other kinds of chip done in the same kind of fab), whilst this stuff is magnetic data storage on movable disk plates, a very different tech. I expect these things at most will only be affected in price very indirectly (for example, if memory prices go up because of all the datacenters targetting AI applications, there might be fewer datacenters set up for other kinds of server side application which are more data-centric, which would impact demand for ultra high-capacity HDDs). Not that it makes much of a difference to us run-of-the-mill techies as consumers - even if HDDs get cheaper, with many times more expensive GPUs and RAM we can hardly put together new systems using these things, so at best it might just get a bit cheaper to expand one's large storage NAS (the slower kind just storing data that doesn't get accessed often, as the other kind uses SDDs).

Well, it might be enough wood to make a hoovel to live in that fits all the 2 m2 of land a young person can afford nowadays.

If it’s not in your hands in an open format it’s not yours.

Not even cats are safe from cats.

Finally some worthy storage for memes! Eat your heart out Ea-nāṣir.

As long as they keep selling the flash memory chips to drive makers, what’s the big deal? There are plenty of China-based companies which still make flash memory drives with a SATA interface using Samsung chips and at this point that tech is so mature that there really isn’t any great added value in terms of performance from getting Samsung SATA drives over getting some generic SATA drives with Samsung chips. It actually makes some sense that Samsung is focusing their consumer-facing device production in a higher performance protocol which is very well established now and were the device speeds are not constrained by the protocol itself, rather than in a protocol were the maximum speed of the protocol (600 MB/s) is actually what constrains the device performance since the memory chips themselves are capable of more.

Indeed. It’s standard distributed systems design to have a hierarchy of storage with different speeds whose contents is allocated based on the frequency with which certain data is accessed, and HDDs are really only good for bulk that which is seldom accessed (basically the speed category for long term storage with low wait times when it does get needed but not really meant to be constantly accessed, which is just above things like tapes and other backup storage methods). So for example for a dynamic website with thousands of users HDDs most current data should be in SSDs and HDDs would maybe contain low access info such as historical data from the last couple of years and in front of those SSDs there would be a ton of memory to serve as a cache for the most accessed of all data (say, the CSS, JS and images of the home page) as in-memory data is even faster to access than data in an SSD. The idea that SSDs aren’t useful for servers is hilarious ignorant.

There are a number of simultaneous bubbles at the moment, the AI one being a lot like the Internet bubble of the late 90s but possibly worse (bigger share of GDP and it seems there is actually less value in most of the tech invested in as “AI” than on the Internet-relate tech) and at the same time there is a financial debt bubble like in 2007 (in the US mainly around loans for car purchase, but more in general overall consumer indebtness has reached the 2007 levels), a worldwide realestate bubble (measured in terms of house-price to income ratios) and a stockmarket bubble measured in terms of P/E ratios, just to mention the biggest ones. The risk is that one blows the rest blow by contagium: something the 2008 Crash showed us is that in modern markets when there are sudden large losses on a asset class it pulls money over to cover them from all other asset classe to cover it creating downwards price pressure in those other asset classes which in turn might cause price collapses there with large losses which in turn pull more money from yet other asset classes. IMHO assets classes with historically high valuation not backed by fundamentals (for example stocks with P/E which are 10+ times the historical average) are likely to be far more likely to collapse when money gets pulled away from them to cover losses elsewhere. Also there is the panic factor: fearing exactly what I describe, many investors will preemptivelly sell their assets in those assets classes they feel as more speculative - i.e. less supported by fundamentals - possibly creating the very problem they fear in those markets by starting a stampede to the exits.

At the same time, just expanding a device with new parts is a far cheaper way to get more performance than buying a new device - after all, whatever price problem there is with some kinds of parts, it will be the same whether they’re sold as lose parts or as part of a device. Poor working class young me in a poorer European country after getting his first PC quickly found out that to get more a more powerful machine he had to start upgrading that machine because there wasn’t money to buy a whole new one every couple of years. My point is that it might very well yield the very opposite effect of what you describe - buying whole devices to replace older models becomes too expensive so people favor more expandable devices - because those can have their performance improved with just some new parts, which are cheaper than getting a whole new device - and the market just responds to that. I think people in countries which until recently are wealthier, such as the US, are far too used to the mindset of “throw the old one out and but a new one” which is not at all the mindset of people in places were resources are constrained or require a lot bigger fraction of people’s income to buy.

This poster Romans!

Santa is gonna be getting a piece of coal this Christmas … and it will be worth it.

“Enjoy the once in century experience of empire collapse from the first row, go sightseeing to ‘once grand but now little more than decrepit and fast fading façades’ and return home with a warm ‘at least it’s not us’ feeling (return trip might be from El Salvador) unlike the poor sods who live in the place”

They’re gonna Ratchet Effect the shit out this!

Well, that’s definitelly going to solve the fall in Tourism problem in the US /s

The EU is now talking about doing what the US was already doing more than a decade ago when Snowden Revelations came out. And don’t get me started on things like the relative ratios of “death by police” and percentage of people in prision (to mention just the things related to the use of force in policing) between America and Europe. The EU is at least a decade behind the US in creeping autoritarianism and a lot of that shit has been imported from the US (including the new style far right, which amongst other things was set-up with money from American billionaires which Steve Bannon brought to Europe years ago very openly to “create far right parties” and is ideologically fed by American money using social media which for example paid Cambridge Analitica to use Facebook to fuel Brexit). In this turn of the Wheel of History, the equivalent of Nazism is spreading out from America.

Personally I’ve been boycotting travel to the US or even just with a transfer in the US since the PATRIOT act. Already over a decade ago I very purposefully chose Canada (highly recommended, by the way) for a month vacationing in North America rather than the US. The writting has been on the wall for this shit ever since they allowed the TSA to start confiscating traveller’s mobile phones and computers way back in Bush’s day - the main difference with the current administration compared to the previous ones is that they’re open about what they’re looking for.

Mate, I’m not the person who answered your original comment. I just saw you making claims about somebody else making fallacious statements when in fact it was you who started with a big fat fallacy and then bitched and moaned when somebody else countered it by pointing out that at least one of the points of “evidence” that you yourself presented for Mr. Krugman’s “pretty good track record” (whatever the fuck such vague and ill-defined expression means) was in fact a fake Nobel prize. As it so happens for a while I had a lot of exposure to Mr. Krugman’s opinions - on and after the 2008 Crash, when I in fact worked in the same industry as he did - and in my opinion he was often full of shit and all over the place, at least back then, and a pretty good illustration of the caricatural Economist “who has predicted 10 of the last 2 downturns”. One could say that he likes to throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. I’ll repeat myself: had you not started with an Appeal To Authority in your original post and just let the logic of the point speak for itself, you would have been better off.

Since you went for an Appeal to Authority as the very first paragraph of your comment, a response that trashes that person’s authoritative credentials is logic in the very context you created and thus not an Ad Hominum. Without that first paragraph on your post you would’ve been right to claim Ad Hominum.

The mouse driver is already part of the OS in Window and Linux. That shit is the Adverts Delivery & Private Data Capture system.