Aceticon

Yeah, well, the whole thing has been a "slow boiling of the frog" over 2 - 3 decades of weakening worker rights and this is coming quite late when things are so bad that literally the majority of young adults are unable to actually find proper jobs and are stuck in an endless chain of exploitative part-time contracts were the rules that say that somebody is supposed to become a permanent employee after 2 years of such contracts in the same place are usually just bypassed by, for example, not giving somebody a contract for a week or two when they're approaching that threshold.

And don't get me started on fake "outsourcing" shit like Uber deliveries.

De facto, worker rights in Portugal are already worse than in most of Europe for those who have entered the job market in the last couple of decades and not that far away from the shit-show in the US, it's just that in practice there are two classes of workers roughly divided by age and the ones on the side with the steady jobs haven't lifted a finger to fight for the rights of the ones who can't actually get a job, only "work".

All this shit, by the way, supported by mainstream politicians of both of the largest parties, even the supposedly (but not at all, as they're Neoliberals above all nowadays) left-of-center one. Mind you, the ones currently in government are the rightmost of both who have been going to the UK to see what the Tories over there did (and from living there I can tell you those types are hard-right Neoliberals/Posh-Fascists) hence this push for getting us over the fence towards an even more American model, same as the Tories have been doing in Britain.

By the way next door Spain has a similar situation because they've adopted similar legislation for part-time contracts at roughly the same time.

Still, better late than never, but maybe not so much better.

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

You're still getting product placement on imported American TV series and Films, same as everybody else.

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 of them dropping the SATA protocol from their consumer devices?

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.

As a consumer, 6 or 7 years ago it definitelly made sense to get a Samsung SATA drive because they were actually some of the fastest in the market, but these days even shitty-shit no-name brand has SATA devices with 580MB/s read speeds (and, if large enough, similar write speeds) which is near the theoretical maximum of SATA3 and M.2 devices supporting PCI4 x16 offer several times the speeds of that.

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 data 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 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-related 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 when 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 classes, in turn creating downwards price pressure in those other asset classes, which in turn might cause price collapses there with large losses and that will pull even more money out from 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.

All this to say that I expect this one when it blows up will be bigger than 2008 and 2000, possibly bigger than both of those combined.

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 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 this might very well yield the very opposite effect of what you describ: 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 most people in countries which until recently were 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 (certainly my experience living in the UK after having grown up in a country which was much poorer left me with that impression: the Brits just felt incredibly wasteful to somebody who like me grew up in a situation were "gettting a new iPhone every 2 years" was the kind of think only a rich person or a stupid person would do).

I suggest you read Sun Tzu's The Art Of War as well as the History of the Roman Empire.

This isn't about China or the US specifically, it's simply a mix of strategical thinking (nullifying an adversary's main advantage makes victory far more likely) and how nations at the specific stage of a nation's growth that the US and China are at spend money in their military - China is a large nation climbing towards Empire stage so their resources are increasing but they'll still parsimonious in their use (because that's exactly how nations climb up from poverty) hence it makes sense that as they have more resources to increase their military might they'll put a lot of them in things that give them the most bang for the buck (and that includes countering their main adversary's most relied-upon military strategy after the Vietnam war - the Carrier Group), whilst the US is at the late stage of Empire and already in decay, which means a fat, glutonous system of power used to lots and lots of wealth floating around and prone to grandiose projects both for the seeming prestige and because they're massive patronage operations and opportunities for corruption and taking a slice of the money sloshing around, and said waste in their military is allowed to happen because, due to their past successes and their size, they trully believe they're unbeatable.

This shit happens again and again in History - it's not even the exception, it's the rule: great empires get killed by the very elites in them becoming ever worse parasites and overconfidence in their might.

Things like the rise of a "Make America Great Again" movement spearheaded by a populist who himself is the ultimate rentier parasite is actually a pretty typical phenomenon of such a phase - again just go read the History of the Roman Empire.

Quantity has a quality of its own

This is a lesson America knew back in the WWII days when they countered the superior Tiger and Leopard Panzers with Sherman tanks, but seems to have forgotten in recent times with its multitude of white elephant projects for "superior systems" which are much more expensive whilst yielding tiny improvements over existing systems.

Meanwhile the era of the drone is upon us, and that's all about using said "quality of its own" of masses of cheap and easy to make drones.

Russia had prepared itself for the usual American strategy of a Carrier Group sitting out far way from the coast and throwing long range cruise missiles and fighter jets at it whilst too far away to be hit by return fire - as used for decades now, for example in the Gulf War - by developing hypersonic missiles and advanced AA capable of shooting down those fighter jets and cruise missiles.

Then they went and started a land war with their next door neighbor - which is almost the opposite military scenario of that which they prepare themselves for - plus on top of it it turned out EVERYBODY was on the take in their Military so it was a hollowed out shell far lesser than it seemed on paper and finally, to add insult to injury, the era of the drone was upon us changing the nature of land warfare as well as on the long range side making mass attacks with cheap quasi-cruise missiles possible.

Given the geography of it if they attack Taiwan, China is - unlike Russia - almost certainly going to be facing the decades old way of American sea-based force projection in the form of the Carrier Group, which is the one they've prepared themselves to counter.