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.

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?