I didn’t. It just looks like the fair number of Cisco (and the occasional Dell) 10/100/sometimes Gigabit switches I’ve seen in junk shops.
I bought a nifty blue Netgear 24-port one mostly because I’m more willing to buy junk from the Humane Society shop, but then decided it was too loud (40mm fans) and went to 2.5G (with smaller fanless switches) instead.
Old Cisco gear shows up in the thrift shops here. I think you can’t even give 10/100 kit away.
American security guarantees are the only thing propping up that stupid narrative.
They’ve always made the claim “TSMC will blow up their own fabs in the event of an invasion”. So, they’re dependent on a lose/lose spite play. If an independent Taiwanese state survives, they’ve demolished one of its major economic engines. If, as far more likely, it falls, everyone involved gets locked up or worse for gross sabotage, and you bought, what, 5 years of global economic distress (oh, no, it might pop the AI bubble…) before everyone else gets back to par with your top-line process? Or maybe you successfully blackmailed bigger and more equipped militaries to fight WWIII for you, and even in the unlikely event Taiwan survives the carnage intact, irradiated corpses buy very few semiconductors.
If America washed their hands of the situation, they’d pretty quickly switch to angling for a deal, perhaps expecting that they’d go for a HK-style “one country/two systems” play, which continues to let them make out like bandits. HSBC doesn’t seemed to have suffered too badly after reunification…
We can test. Send a lander with Palestinian tardigrades and see if they experience discrimination and attempts to expel them from the lunar surface.
Not necessarily precise, just a more resonant presentation. She didn’t have a killer sound bite. If details actually mattered, we’d be in the closing months of the second Warren administration after all.
I literally saw scads of signs saying “Trump - Low Prices/Kamala - High Prices” and one that specifically claimed “Want $2.15 gas, vote Trump.” She didn’t counter well at the slogan/vibes level. There was no “Harris/Walz/$2-per-pound ground beef” signage.
It’s also an audience problem. The Democrats, as incumbents, were stuck with higher expectations. They couldn’t pad their numbers with low-hanging “I just want different” and “let’s burn it all down” crowds, so they have to chase voters who are harder to activate.
The message was weak though. The policy was fairly limited-- like limits on gouging in emergencies-- and not expressed in terms of a tangible achievable metric. And it’s not like we have direct economic control that would allow for specific deliverables-- how exactly are you goung to get Kroger to bend the knee? A fine that’s 12 seconds of their turnover?
‘I’ll get the 99-cent Taco Supreme back’ (or the $2 gallon of milk/dozen eggs) would have helped-- a graspable specific rallying cry. “We’ll tax gougers back into the stone age” maybe too. ISTR there’s some rightwing scumball in Canada who achieved most of his political rise by literally campaigning on $1-per-can beer. Again, a tangible goal, and one more achievable because there’s direct state controlled alcohol sales in much of the country…
While prestigious, I have to think the type of lawyer who wants Trump for a client is hardly goingbto want to do heavy government work for a civil servant’s salary. Surely there’s way more cash in skip-and-falls and “get six divorce punches on your loyalty club card and the 7th is free”.
What I hate about the current situation is that there’s no room for “Russia is a significant power that won’t suddenly vanish, so maybe if we can avoid being at complete loggerheads with them 24/7, it might avoid decades of tension and expensive military grandstanding.”
You must either fellate Putin or demand the entire 82 billion square kilometres of the Russian state turned to glass. No other options. It worries me that any more nuanced takes on Russia get pushed into the “Kremlin talking points” file.
Not that she isn’t a screwball all on her own, but we could use a less militaristic take here.
ISTR having some hallucinogenic colour issues when Vulkan wasn’t properly installed.
If we can pick home computers that lean into cartridges, the Atari 800XL is a real winner. Nice two-tone finish, classy silver buttons with a plexi trim oiece covering the power light.
I doubt they enjoy having their balls in TSMC’s vice.
Intel is the only option remotely available to leverage against them.
I suspect that democracy is a “good times” system. It works well enough when the problems are either low-stakes or widely agreed upon.
When you get into a world of hard choices-- for example, anything where we have to devalue some existing wealth – suddenly there’s going to be both a lack of consensus (likely manufactured) and leaders too afraid of losing the next vote to pull the trigger.
That’s why I expect to see China solve its climate change and housing problems faster than the West. Without the almighty polls lurking in the shadows, they can say “petrol is 100 yuan a litre to discourage its use” or “we’re nationalizing second homes and disbursing them to schoolteachers.”
Goung for the plausible deniability aspect.
Electric grid implodes It was like that when I got there, sir.
Fujifilm successfully repositioned towards other chemistry. I know there’s that Eastman spinoff but why wasn’t it as successful?
ARM has a high probability of blowing a tire.
They have a complex relationship with their licensees which may try to cause self-sabotage trying to pull more of the money home. See the various licensing fights.
If you don’t want or need x86, what does ARM have to offer-- in the long term-- over RISC-V, which is much less coupled to a single firm’s caprice? We can assume the gap in performance will continue to shrink ovrr time.
Maybe it’s time to re-randomize the map. Six Californias, merge a couple Dakotas, and a new state called “Steve” in the middle of Texas for no good reason.
States seem to be a classic seemed-sensible-in-1790 hack, goofier and less relevant as time goes on. At best you get arbitrage plays, finding the most comfortable jurisdiction for your particular graft. At worst, it seems to be a great line for the scum too stupid and/or crooked to get a federal position to settle at.
I wonder if a UK-style model, where the regional governments are devolved narrow lists of things they can play at government with, would work better.
I always figured BSD should lean into the daemon imagery with a full heavy-metal branding: a suite of wallpapers with decidedly less cuddly daemons, a succubus OS-tan character… make it the go-to Edgelord Desktop.
Then FreeBSD introduced that stupid sphere logo. No sense of branding. :P
But GOG is alresdy the Steam with Principles…