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what a lot of people can't understand is that a car I'm singapore is a ball and chain. it's not freedom by any stretch of the imagine there.

it's a status symbol or a job requirement.

you can visit the entire country on the subway or a short grab ride.

owning registering, parking, repairing and fueling a car is a completely unnecessary living cost, not to mention much much more expensive than the US or Europe.

hello~

westerner tech guy in China here. they haven't thrown me out yet, but then they haven't grown up an equivalent of we do yet either. they haven't tried to steal it or learn our secrets either.

nope for the last 3 or 4 years they've asked to license it to a local firm or better yet sell it outright to them. each time the price goes up and I suspect at some point it will become so irresistible that the founders will do it.

interestingly the sanctions closed us off from a lot of big institutes and companies who faced with losing the capability entirely just went ahead and acquired a bunch of Japanese stuff and jerry rigged it together. so that sucked.

because that's it, if we don't sell it to them someone else will and that'll be the end of the party for everyone.

pretty sure this has played out in history before.

maybe I misinderstand your meaning but at its heart the real problem is that chip engineers salary has been stuck at ten years ago for about twenty years. Like 50k usd.

This in and of itself is not a huge problem but with no downstream opportunities there isn't enough talent considering a career toward the top of the value chain.

The 1980s and 1990s saw alot of people come back to Taiwan, but the 2010s and 2020s sees it happen in another direction (mainland, the salary is awesome).

Of course many will say factory workers don't need to smart enough to do design. but IC production is complicated and needs skilled labor with some understanding of what they're doing.

It's going to freak you out to learn there are actually pro-unification people in Taiwan of the "one country two systems" ilk. A lot less than there used to be, and I doubt it will ever be more than it is now.

This guy has been mega successful on the mainland he had reason to believe it would be a good thing for Taiwan.

If you ask people on the street most of them just want peace. Even if that means the Taiwan question never gets answered in their lifetime. When some thirsty westerner grand stands about Taiwan they cringe in fear knowing it will be their families who has to pay the bill.

Alot of people on either side of the strait feel nothing will happen and are tied of politicians amping it up and tempting fate.

I didnt like friendlyjordies brand of humor. not one bit.

when he started going after that dog cunt broz I couldn't help myself. I had to watch.

by now I love him, he's become a hero of what free speech (such that it) is in Australia. served with a massive dose of sarcasm and ridicule.

I'll keeping giving him money and watching his shit while he keeps going there and calling out all the bullshit that goes on in australian government.

my mum bought me a vic-20. it was beat up and didn't have a tape deck.

I had type my games in from a magazine in basic for a summer, I was hooked.

My uncle gave me a photocopy of a book about assembly for c64 and showed me intros on his c128. He had no idea about programming, he just figured I'd be into it. I worked my heart out to get the cash together for a c64 AND a disk drive.

For me it's like this, I have a useful point to add to the conversation but when I interject the lag is juuuuust long enough that it ends up I'm talking over the next person.

So when I lead a meeting with zoom participants I either force dead air to allow the remote people to jump in, or I eat as much dead air as possible to lock them out of the conversation. depending on my own agenda.

incidentally this problem doesn't exist in asynchronous collaboration methods. but zoom and it's like win out on shear informwtion bandwidth.

The current video conferencing and remote working systems are indeed amazing feats of technology and social acceptance, but we still need to work on it. a lot.

There's a very simple way to measure the migration of manufacturing out of China.

get a list of the top ten cargo ports in the world. count how many are mainland China?

7 or 8 right?

okay let's go down the list until we get Vietnam or India or someplace where'd you'd expect the manufacturing to go to.

aight... now compare all the cargo capacity for that entire country to one of the eight ports in China? tell you what, let's include India, and Rotterdam, and LA... just add them all together. How many of 8 does it take to keep up with that 2 or 3 ?

so, cargo shipping capacity... big difference right? day light.

Vietnam wants to make iPhones. you gotta ship 110% of the various bits into Vietnam and then ship out 99% of the finished goods.

all those ports come with piles and piles of back end infrastructure. roads. trucking. rail. skilled workers...

there are infinite alternatives to China. but it will take 40 years to develop any of them to that level.

There's like a 15% tariff on imported cars (from memory), they're definitely over priced there and always have been. There's foreign brands thar aren't imported, ie produced locally. For a while GM Shanghai was making a fuck load of cars there but its slowly been tapering off. My CN Telsa was bit cheaper than the same one in the US. But I couldn't tell you that it's apples for apples, sometimes the local model of something is cheaper because it's made of cheaper stuff.

The bigger issue for big city china when buying a car is the plates. If its an ICE the cost of getting plates can be 100x that of a EV. Regardless of where it's made.

As for stuffing products in a friendly customer or by some kind of stupid regulation is not common but happens. There is a complex web of incestuous company ownership and an equally complex web of influence and indirect ownership by the government. If someone needs to hit their numbers real bad it's possible they'll ask / insist / regulate that another company buys up to help make it happen. There are a few laws that are supposed to prevent it, but if nobody complains then probably nobody investigates.

I've seen this happen a few times with stuff much cheaper than diggers.

I have to assume that openAI also paid for the books. if yes then i consider it the same as me reciting passages from memory or coming up with derivative text.

if no, then by all means, go after them and any model trainer for the cost of one book.

Asking an LLM to recite an entire novel isn't even vaguely a thing yet.

shrooms can be a bit of a dice room on visuals.

once boiled up half a shopping bag of shrooms and split the tea with one friend.

There were infinite moments where the fabric of space time twisted up into the cosmos believably revealing to me a path into the heavens. I had to control my breathing otherwise the torrent of everyday objects flowing past me would move too quickly for me to get enough traction.

I once had three tiny died shrooms, and a bong hit disconnected my soul from my body and transferring me into an ancient dog sleeping in the sun on a wide open field in the wilderness. the entire thing seemed to go for eons but collapsed back into my living room in and instant when some rang the doorbell.

Then I've had shrooms where the trip was extremely profound and emotional but the only visual was the leaves of the trees just looked a bit brighter and more flappy in wind or some swirly clouds of colors bouncing around my hifi speakers.

Yhey optimized and expanded the last CS game for like ten years. It was driven by DLC but the entire time CS vanilla was getting fixes and improvements.

There were some pretty lame limitations to the core simulation that stayed there the entire time but at least the devs were pretty open about having no plans to change them.

The CS2 story won't really play out entirely for a year or two yet.

The real estate market doesn't account for 30% of the economy. Though I suppose there's a bunch of way to measure "the economy".

There is pent up demand for housing yet property marketing is dropping. Actually it may have bottomed out but who knows. Beijing wants to correct it and that's what's been happening.

I have property in tier 1 and tier 2, it dropped to pre covid levels. I wasn't doing property for quick flips but I definitely noticed it.

The scars of covid are everywhere in China just like most countries. its going to take a while for it to recover. just like everywhere else.

China collapse remains a click bait dream for the time being if you ask me.

yeh but I got ten years of a really great game, with a really great community. It took a long time for me to care that the lane change mechanics weren't optimal.

that ten years buys a fuck ton of good will for me. Life doesn't run on legal obligations.

China was briefly an observer state to Warsaw Pact and then pretty quickly completely withdrew.

After sino-sovet split in the early 60s Sino-soviet relations did not really normalize until Gorbachev.

The former Chinese government (now kmt in taiwan) took a loan like 80 years ago. after the war, the PRC and the USA both just kinda assumed China wasn't ever going to pay.

For a while there USA maintained that the KMT was the government in exile, but with normalization with the PRC, that all kinda got swept under the carpet.

The US debt held by China today, is the same as other countries are holding. People need to believe this will be one day repaid and profitable.