I love how Trump has exactly one note to play and he just wails on it at every opportunity

Facebook marketing across high schools and colleges is intense. And because it’s such a pivotal platform, you kinda need to get one and build up a - let’s call it a social credit score - just so you can endure admittance counselors and employers demanding to see your account as part of the screening process.

Sort of like getting a credit card as a teenager so you can prove you’re credit worthy enough for an apartment or car loan in your twenties. You just have to post generic mundane bullshit on the timeline and join generic mundane groups so people see you as “normal”.

Are you truly implying it’d be more secure to buy Chinese tech then US specifically

Only if your primary concern was US-centric surveillance. If you cared about Chinese surveillance, idfk. Big hanging question mark as to whether American native systems are more compromised than Chinese native systems. All I can say for sure is that American systems are confirmed compromised by both US-friendly surveillance and Chinese hacker groups.

That’s quite the take lmao.

It’s very easy to believe “Thing from China bad because China Bad”. But once you look into the actual security schema for these tools and applications, you discover Americans did an excellent job of leaving their hardware exposed to domestic infiltration and a terrible job of securing it against foreign intrusion.

You think the USA is going to start WWIII?

Greenland does. Venezuela does. Iran does.

You know what the best evidence is for “China Bad”? They promoted and endorsed Donald Trump

Honestly, where do you even get this shit? The people who promoted Donald Trump were Americans. And they’d been promoting him since the 1970s. Nobody in China gave a shit about Trump until January 6th, 2017.

Sure. But to say the American entrenchment around American tech companies is some kind of buffer to Chinese spying clearly hasn’t born out in practice. Americans have pockmarked their tech with security vulnerabilities and Chinese hackers have waltzed right through them. You aren’t safer from the CCP because you’re on American hardware. Just the opposite.

They think they invented “random” humor

Do they? Most seem to know damned well that they got it from their parents / older siblings.

Can’t believe a bunch of college freshmen would be into porn and masturbating. When I went to college it was totally different. We were all chaste as nuns and modest and church mice.

Oh whoa is society! The Youngs are ruining everything! Would that they behaved in the way I remember my generation doing it - diligent, virtuous, humble, and perfectly in every way.

The argument - that goes back to the Bush “War on Terror” anti-China tech policy - is that any hardware produced outside the NATO sphere could leave domestic users vulnerable to foreign surveillance.

But scratch the surface of this critique and you find something very different. It’s the US technology that’s riddled with backdoors.

According to reports, the hack took advantage of systems built by ISPs like Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies (formerly CenturyLink) to give law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to the ISPs’ user data. This gave China unprecedented access to data related to U.S. government requests to these major telecommunications companies. It’s still unclear how much communication and internet traffic, and related to whom, Salt Typhoon accessed.

The problem with Chinese technology is that, in many cases, American surveillance companies haven’t penetrated it. A domestic market with Chinese phones and routers and other online gadgets riddles the Five Eyes Panopticon with blind spots.

All the major telecoms are heavily exposed to the computer hardware market.

Sure, the majority aren’t seeing a payoff. But we only really care about the Magnificent Seven and their increased revenue from government contracts (particularly Pentagon weapons platforms and public-private surveillance deals).

Lol Volkswagen, the company that actively rigged diesel cars to pass the tests… ?

That’s the one. They’re run by absolute pieces of corporate shit, but they do still seem to recognize the market driven writing on the wall.

The German car manufacturers are hopelessly late at EV because they wanted to drain every last penny out of their ICE.

The pool in Europe is a lot shallower, especially in the wake of the Russia/Ukraine war. They don’t have the same access to cheap fossil fuels that the US enjoys, so they’re being forced to pivot to EVs entirely due to their regional limitations. They’re also competing internationally in a market with a growing Global South demand. Many of these countries are undergoing electrification far faster than they’re seeing a petrochemical expansion, in no small part thanks to the high installation costs of pipelines and processing plants relative to electric grids and renewables generation.

The Volkswagen id (EV) sales numbers are so disappointing they had to lower production and make employees stay home.

The entire EU economy has stalled out with the war. But they’ve seen a double-digit upswing in EV sales in Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific Rim.

There’s definitely an element of reflexive “China Bad!” in these predictions of imminent collapse. But I do feel like I’m talking to a KHiver doing the High Hopes dance in late October 2024.

The irrationality of the China Hawks feels endless. This country is simultaneously about the launch a Third World War on every regional neighbor and mere weeks away from complete societal implosion. It’s always on the verge of some kind of cataclysm that will Change Everything.

The sentiment seems to parallel people predicting the end of the AI bubble, people predicting that Trump will keel over and die from Oldtimers in the next few days, and people insisting they’re holding a winning lottery ticket two days before the drawing. Just total divorce from material conditions.

Don’t hold your breath on either one. The attempted phase out of Chinese electronics is its own self-imposed economic drag, especially as China’s semiconductor industry takes off while the western manufacturers are hobbled by their fixation on AI.

When CPU and RAM prices get high enough, you’re going to see some very lucrative black markets for sanctions evasion.

Did you also know solar panels have a theoretical limit of 33%

Did you know fractions are predicated on a base value?

So really we’re talking about pennies on the dollar at the end of the day

That’s definitely an aphorism.

I can’t imagine a conversation where he wouldn’t sound apeshit.

In one case, the graphics card in question was the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4080 16GB Aero OC, a custom variant of the GeForce RTX 4080 that retailed for around $1,199 at launch. The seller claimed the graphics card was not functional and wanted to offload it for just $143.50 on Xianyu, a popular second-hand marketplace in China.

So this isn’t even an American retailer carrying bad cards? It’s a Chinese second-hand seller peddling admitted non-functional cards for refurbishment. I guess the general advice is good and knowing what to look out for is useful, but it feels niche.

Elon Musk is more of an African American than people judged by the color of their skin

If Musk was truly a first generation African American, he’d have been deported already.

Australia’s economy has been in a tailspin precisely because China hasn’t been buying enough coal.

Fortunately, India, Maylasia, and Indonesia have picked up the slack at the prodding of fossil fuel interests.

Funny thing. Cloudy and rainy days tend to be windier than sunny days. So, with a bit of battery reserve or net metering, it all balances out.