One reason why Buenos Aires didn’t make the list.

Gooning

Never loud enough such that they can hear you from an artillery battery.

Sort of half the joke. Some natives sued for peace. Other natives fought to the last man. None of them won in the end, because they were outgunned, outnumbered, and outflanked. The survivors were just the ones who were best at survival, not the most committed to a particular ideology or position.

Billions of poor people are giving their money

Well… their labor

Great idea in theory.

Curious to know how we implement it in practice

Boomers hit that sweet spot.

American boomers, maybe. The 60s/70s was real shit for most of the Third World.

Much of our modern Economic Anxiety driving MAGA and the reactionary insanity of our foreign policy is these same Boomers being forced to live in a world that isn’t just the car dealerships in Detroit commanding the global economy.

For the 90s Kids, life outside the US hasn’t been this good in a century or more. Whether you’re in Bogota, Berlin, Beijing, or Bankok, it’s a time of unprecedented plenty.

The fact that America isn’t this shining city on a hill anymore is what Trumpsters find so galling.

Ukraine seems to finally be able to strike the Russian economy.

I’ve been hearing this line since 2022. For all the sanctions and sabotage, Russia still seems pegged to the Petrodollar and continues to chug along as well as any OPEC state.

Meanwhile, there’s no introspection on the Ukrainian economy or how another year of war will affect them.

Germany lost WW1 without a hostile soldier on its original territory for example.

And famously never recovered, leaving the UK and France to command Europe uncontested for the next century.

:-/

Listen, I want a Winter Palace Coup as much as any NAFO-head, but you can only claim you’re winning at the Somme for so long before people start learning to count the body bags.

That’s like saying BRICS is an aggressive organisation because of what Russia is currently doing…

I’ve heard more than a few NAFO heads repeat exactly that

Americans are bankrolling the Ukrainian defense and extracting enormous concessions from Zelensky as a result.

The longer the war drags on, and the more debt Ukraine assumes in the process, the less sovereignty they’ll maintain in the aftermath.

The stupidest kids in the room right now are the folks at the Russia/Ukraine border who traded in their sovereignty (and often their lives) over an ethnic pissing contest. American investors are going to come out of this flush. Taxpayers are eating the same shit sandwich as everyone else in NATO.

This reads better in the original Navajo

Ukraine still officially contests Crimea. It hasn’t been surrendered.

But there’s also no real expectation Ukraine can retake the territory in their current position. And the longer the war drags on, the more territory they’re in a position to lose.

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.

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.

Most people aren’t cheering that we are rearming, but they understand that it is a necessary evil.

Plenty of people are chomping at the bit for a Glorious New War we can all watch on the TV.

Russia is right at our doorsteps

That hasn’t been true in over 40 years. And even when it was true, Europeans suffered far more under the paranoid police states of their own governments than any cross border conflict.

Personally I prefer the first option.

Not like any of us have a material say, but enjoy conscription I guess.