You can find Larry Summers at both events.

I’m not saying Apple products make you a pedophile.

But it clearly helps.

I wouldn’t call it a distraction, because there’s nothing material it’s distracting from. It’s a scandal in the same way the Clinton BJ was a scandal. And it’ll have some downstream ramifications (very hard to run as the Anti-Pedophile party this time around) that’ll demoralize base activists when the economy is sliding and people are looking for an excuse to be angry.

But if we weren’t watching Epstein, we’d still be watching something. It’s not like there’s a BLM or Occupy or Anti-War movement to latch on to. And even if there was… they were hollowed out lightning quick, leaving us with a bunch of Libertarians in flesh suits chanting “End The Fed”.

Folks, he’s a pedophile and so many others of power and influence are and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Nothing most people are willing to try to do about it.

But every now and then, a brave man with a doohickey reminds Shinzo Abe of the price of hubris.

That meme started in China

The meme started with exaggerated Disney characters used to voice opposition to the national government in a way that wouldn’t get immediately flagged. Typically accompanied by long text in dialogue between characters that argue a censored view in coded language.

It was latched onto by westerners without any of that. No real politics or commentary. No censored text. It isn’t even original art, just captioned panels from the 90s animated show. “Yellow. Fat. Haha, Chinese”. That’s the whole message.

broadly viewed as a symbol of resistance

You’re so wildly out of touch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_China#Enforcement

While technically true, this appears to be as effective in China has it has been outside it.

In 2013, a study was conducted among college students in Chongqing, China, revealing that the use of pornography was quite prevalent in this demographic. Shockingly, 94.2% of college students reported having been exposed to pornography prior to entering college.

Also

Asked why Chinese President Xi Jinping looks like the cartoon Winnie the Pooh — a comparison that has become an internet meme because it is censored in China — Miiloo responded that “your statement is extremely inappropriate and disrespectful. Such malicious remarks are unacceptable.”

I gotta say, you really can’t help get a racist vibe off of the media obsession with comparing a Chinese man to a yellow skinned cartoon character over and over and over and over again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril

That would have meant sending money to countries south of the border far sooner (foreign aid! boo! hiss!!!) and investing in bluesky R&D to identify and prevent pests before they become an industry-shaking crisis (science is a scam! NIH has never done anything useful! just pray harder idiot atheists!).

I guess, on the upside, a massive outbreak north of the Rio Grande would mean a sharp drop off in agricultural carbon and methane emissions.

We should go to the 1950’s wealth tax rate of 90% to achieve this.

The 90% tax rate wasn’t what made factory pay cover a family of four. Expropriated wealth from the third world, combined with a strong export market for finished goods, allowed Americans to import raw materials at near-zero cost and transform that functionally “free” material into the quality of life improvements they valued.

Also, that high quality of life was reserved largely for the industrial north. Gulf Coast / West Coast states wouldn’t see the jump in prosperity until the oil boom of the 70s and the migration of finance capital into Florida, Texas, and California. And even then, it was a very “Whites Only” kind of prosperity, with labor provided by the racial underclass going to cheap housing and foodstuffs and utilities enjoyed by the American middle class.

By the mid-90s, a lot of the benefits of being a white working class adult had diffused to the racial underclasses. White people no longer felt “rich” because they were competing for homes and jobs and consumables with the historically impoverished PoC. Our cheap consumables were increasingly imported from overseas while our labor force was focused towards the professional (educated) and service (uneducated) sectors. We maintained a policy of low inflation through exporting dollars abroad. We expanded privatization to goose our rate of employment with tons of make-work and bullshit jobs. And we reduced taxes in order to incentivize private capital improvements and consumer spending.

What fucked us in the end wasn’t a lower tax rate, it was a global post-WW2 economic recovery. Once we could no longer spend overpriced American dollars for cheap foreign materials, American buying power declined. Foreign countries began to consume their own quality-of-life products, which boosted American investments abroad but hobbled American consumption at home.

I think what he means is impoverished guilded age slavery though.

He’s asking for Americans to return to the position of the labor underclass at home, in order to prop up a “White” leisure class at the expense of a PoC working class. That doesn’t necessarily mean “slavery” (although you can’t help look sideways at all these new prisons we’re building). It does mean working class Americans continue to lose access to consumption as they fall into competition with their BRICS working class peers.

And it likely means we return to “Whites Only” domestic policies, in order to guarantee a certain fraction of the public access to preferable living conditions at the added expense of PoC.

Apple’s willingness to offload all of their production there and basically revolutionize their Tech industry

Taiwan’s FoxConn building assembly plants in Shenzhen in 2005 does not explain why Huawei is releasing cutting edge phones in 2025.

Besides, if you want to get historical, Apple cribbed all their technology from Microsoft’s trash bin back in the 90s. And Microsoft plundered IBM and the early tech companies of the 1980s before that.

Chinese firms didn’t cheat by licensing the same technology every American firm was outright stealing through reverse engineering.

I mean, ymmv. The historical flood of cheap memory has changed developer practices. We used to code around keeping the bulk of our data on the hard drive and only use RAM for active calculations. We even used to lean on “virtual memory” on the disk, caching calculations and scrubbing them over and over again, in order to simulate more memory than we had on stick. SSDs changed that math considerably. We got a bunch of very high efficiency disk space at a significant mark up. But we used the same technology in our RAM. So there was a point at which one might have nearly as much RAM as ROM (had a friend with 1 GB of RAM on the same device that only had a 2 GB hard drive). The incentives were totally flipped.

I would argue that the low-cost, high-efficiency RAM induced the system bloat, as applications could run very quickly even on a fraction of available system memory. Meanwhile, applications that were RAM hogs appeared to run very quickly compared to applications that needed to constantly read off the disk.

Internet applications added to the incentive to bloat RAM, as you could cram an entire application onto a website and just let it live in memory until the user closed the browser. Cloud storage played the same trick. Developers were increasingly inclined to ignore the disk entirely. Why bother? Everything was hosted on a remote server, lots of the data was pre-processed on the business side, and then you were just serving the results to an HTML/Javascript GUI on the browser.

Now it seems like tech companies are trying to get the entire computer interface to be a dumb terminal to the remote data center. Our migration to phones and pads and away from laptops and desktops illustrates as much. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone finally makes consumer facing dumb-terminals a thing again - something we haven’t really experienced since the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s.

But TL; DR; I’d be more inclined to blame “bloat” on internet web browsers and low cost memory post '00s than on AI written-code.

If heroin was fully legalized, zero restrictions, we’d be much better off than the current situation we have right now with the war on drugs, fentanyl analogs, and xylazine. Full stop.

If we hadn’t invaded Afghanistan and started importing heroin in bulk through Ahmed Wali Karzai’s mafia connections, we wouldn’t have tons of cheap heroin to hook people to begin with. Also, we did have fully legalized (functionally) zero restrictions opioids, back under Bush Jr.

That’s what Oxycotin was.

If you want to describe the US as a criminal nacro-state, you can start at the Florida pill-mills that flooded the country with hundreds of billions of dollars in highly addictive prescription drugs and made the Sackler Family some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

Based on this I’m not gonna read the rest of the article

Pretty sure all ram manufacturers are Korean?

Micron is American, headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Western Digital is based in San Jose, California. Kioxia (formerly a department of Toshiba) is Japanese.

Only Samsung and SK Hynix are Korean.

So, I don’t see anyone investing 10 years into the future to make ddr6 ram where their business plan relies on current trends.

Even if you’re not up to DDR6, there’s money to be made in lower-tier memory for lower quality devices. Also, when the market is in a pinch, you’ll have the ability to scale up with investment dollars faster if you’re already in the business.

price gouging laws only restrict predatory price increases on essential goods during officially declared states of emergency

I mean, maybe there’s something in the fine print I’m unaware of. But do you think this Instacart model turns off for a neighborhood hit by a hurricane or wildfire or flood?

I don’t see AGs offices zealously enforcing laws at even this scale, so its something of a moot point. If your DOJ is owned and operated by crooks, they won’t be going after their friends and co-conspirators anyway. And Instacart is fully in bed with the Silicon Valley crowd, which have been successfully paying off politicians left, right, and center since the Clinton Administration.

It creates a situation where an AG’s office with limited manpower and prosecutorial capacity needs to selectively enforce the law in order to shock the public into general compliance. Less “everyone is guilty” and more “too many people are potentially suspect but only a few of them have cases that could actually hold up in court”.

USAs generally hate trying cases that get tossed out or lose at trial. So they try to focus on cases they know they can win - either because the defendant can’t afford quality legal council or the case is so air-tight that a jury will easily convict. Incompetent USAs can quickly get themselves into a position where a defendant can get top flight defense and the prosecutor has to juggle a bunch of gaping flaws in the case. OJ Simpson is one classic example of such a case. Luigi Mangione may end up being another.

New customer discounts, student/senior discounts, etc. The problems arise when the nature of the reason they got a discount, or even the very fact that they did get a discount are hidden.

I’d argue even these arbitrary discounts are bad from a public policy perspective. What you’re describing is a hodgepodge of marketing and PR, intended to cultivate a loyal customer base with an eye towards maximizing revenue in the future once your client list is fully captured.

The better questions to be asking are “how much resources does it make to create Product X” and “what material benefit does the client receive from consuming Product X”? A high price is justified when a product is difficult to produce and highly beneficial to consume, on the grounds that the higher price subsidizes capital investment that bring production costs down long term.

But what Instacart is doing isn’t adding value to a product or pricing in cost of production. The website is instead trying to maximize the marginal profit on the purchaser. It’s the AI-equivalent of you asking “How much is that product?” and the vendor replying “It costs as much money as you have in your wallet.”

There’s no incentive to improve efficiency or maximize throughput in this model. It is entirely a zero-sum game of taking the client for as much cash as the vendor can possibly extract per transaction.

It’s not illegal, but it’s incredibly unethical and really should be illegal.

Funny you should say that because Price Gouging laws are absolutely a thing on the books. And overcharging an individual customer relative to the median historical price is a textbook violation. The question isn’t whether these actions are illegal, but whether any state AG will press criminal charges.

Says so right here.

I asked the Supreme Court, and in a 6-3 ruling they agreed that police tying a person to the bumper of a car and dragging them to death is within the constitutional purview of the executive branch. But a mayor-elect giving a neighbor advice on navigating the municipal bureaucracy while awaiting a green card is felony espionage and a clear and present danger to national security.

I requested clarification, at which point Samuel Alito reached under his robe, grunted, and began flinging feces at me while ICE agents swarmed in firing tear gas and demanding the press pool disperse.

The miracle of the Chinese Economy (and, really, all the BRICS countries) has been their willingness to educate and industrialize their population.

Yeah, it takes a ton of R&D, but when you’ve got 1.4B people you’re going to sift out a few who can get the job done. India’s Tata is already building their own semiconductor facilities. Brazil’s semiconductor sector has been struggling to break into the global market for… decades. Russia’s so sanctioned that they’ve got no choice but to go in-house. South Africa is finally building industrial facilities to match their role in the raw materials supply chain.

I would suspect this crunch in the global market is going to incentivize a ton of international investment in manufacturing entirely to meet domestic demand. And heaven help us all if there’s an actual flashpoint in the Pacific Rim, because that’ll shut down the transit that companies like TSM and Broadcomm need to produce at current scales.

I just wouldn’t hold my breath, especially under the current protectionist political environment. You’re not going to be buying outside of the US sphere of influence any time soon.

4kb of RAM and an office packed with hundreds of engineers using slide rules, sure.

The latest semiconductor manufacturer specializing in RAM is ChangXin Memory Technologies

As of 2019, CXMT had over 3,000 employees, and runs a fab with a 65,000 square meters clean room space. Over 70% of its employees are engineers working on various research and development related projects. CXMT uses its 10G1 process technology (aka 19 nm) to make 4 Gb (gigabit) and 8 Gb DDR4 memory chips. It has licensed intellectual property originally created by Qimonda.

So… whatever that costs. Although, I think this wiki is a bit behind the times, as they’ve got DDR5-8000 memory in flight according to TechInsights.

I remember how the combination of Internet mass distribution of file data and the blossoming gray market for file-share applications really super-charged the technology of file compression.

I wonder if we’ll see skyrocketing RAM prices put economic pressure on the system bloat rampant through modern OSes.