partial_accumen

The left begins at socialism.

If you’re talking about the political spectrum I would think the extreme far left would begin at anarchism and eventually graduate to socialism as you move farther right.

The scary part of this one is that previously, we had administrations that, while still being right-of-center (yes ML, I know), had at least enough sense to prop things up well enough to recover.

I’ll admit I haven’t cataloged all financial crises in American history, but I can’t think of any right-of-center administrations that have cleaned up a things for a recovery. Perhaps only exception might be the Oil Crisis under Carter, and the recovery under Reagan. Great depression, Black Monday, Great Recession, COVID recession, all happened under right-of-center Presidents and recovered under left-of-center Presidents.

I started another point-by-point rebuttable about my individual disagreements with your arguments, but I think we’re just too far away from one another for more meaningful discussion on this. Thank you for your discussion up to this point though.

Edit: I should have lead with this, but I’ll add it now after-the-fact. I really appreciate you taking the time to response and share your views and data. Even though I don’t necessarily agree with it. I want to thank you for talking.

Capitalists in the US, facing internal market saturation and steadily falling rates of profit, have had to expand outward, leveraging a strong overseas military to keep the global south under their thumb.

My point is that capitalism isn’t the only system susceptible to this. All governments in human history have fallen to a version of this if they rise to any substantial size.

The empire of Japan did the same thing for the same reason causing their start of WWII in the late 1930s. In China the Qing Dynasty collapsed in the 1910s under the weight of its expansion. Rome did the same with collapse in 98AD to 117AD. The Aztec empire fell because of contact with European explorers, but the Aztec society was certainly based upon strict social hierarchies mirroring much of Europe with an aristocracy on one side and serfdom on the other.

It isn’t about “discovering” new systems. History is not progressed by people randomly discovering new ideas, but is a gradual material process, and the ideas that rise and fall are secondary to that and support that process. Liberalism arose because of capitalism’s rise and need for ideological justification.

I disagree. We haven’t found a stable system yet, so more exploration, discovery, evolution (whichever euphemism you want to insert here) is needed to arrive at something stable for humanity. The alternative is we just accept we get a few generations or tens of generations before society falls and we rinse and repeat.

As for socialism, the easiest answer is the PRC.

That… was not was I was expecting as your exemplar of socialism.

This century is going to be marked by China’s undisputed rise. As they continue to develop, market mechanics will continue to be phased out

I’m not so sure about that. First, China has a lot going for it to reach what you’re describing. I don’t dispute that. However, there’s been a shortcoming I’ve observed of China’s path to growth over the last 50 years that I don’t see called out. They’ve reach market mature and economic success far faster than a nation like the USA given the same amount of time. They have been, and still are, on a speedrun of national growth. However, this means they’ve had multiple generations robbed of “the good times” during growth were the growth slower.

Compared against the rise of the middle class in the USA post-WWII we’ve had 3 or 4 generations gain wealth, education, health care and raise families of their own with good paying jobs and readily available resources. In the USA we have grandparents or even great-grandparents that can tell us about the national poverty of living through the Great Depression, and how that shaped their choices (and those of their line). In China, its many times, the parents that lived through that subsistence poverty and their (now middle aged adult) children are the first generation to experience a middle class lifestyle and resources. Two to three generations of generational wealth building simply didn’t occur in China because they’re moving and developing so fast. The problem with this is, the boom times of manufacturing wealth have already started to decline in 大陆. Commodity manufacturing is already shifting out of China to other nations in the global south. Vietnam, Cambodia, India, and others are getting new manufacturing work that was previously going to China.

China has some giant problems looming in the next 50 year. Its population decline (as a result of state-enforced controls of birth) overcorrected and set up China to possibly be worse off that South Korea or even Japan in the decades ahead. source

China is a large net importer of both energy and food. All of these things together give me doubts China will be a long term stable society.

Other countries, like Cuba, manage to maintain higher quality of life metrics despite being under intense embargo than peer countries.

Cuba has done decently given its circumstances, but its historically another authoritarian regime. Further, much of Cuba’s progress might be attributable to artificial support from the Soviet Union to maintain its ally so close to its largest opponent.

The USSR had, in its time, the most rapid improvements in economic growth and quality of life in history.

…for those allowed to live.

None of these countries have been perfect utopias, or anything,

Dismissing Stalin’s purges and the Holodomor against Ukraine, much less the brutal repression of culture in Eastern Europe is doing a disservice to your argument of not being “perfect utopias”. The Soviet Union was as much an empire as the USA was in its expansion into other nations and suppression the local populace for exploitation.

but all have surpassed the inherent unsustainability of capitalism.

The Soviet Union was both born decades to centuries after other modern capitalist nations, and collapsed before them doesn’t really lend credence to your statement here about surpassing unsustainability.

To circle back to my main point. I’m not saying the USA has this figured out. I could write pages on what we’re doing wrong and how its leading to our decline. I’m saying nobody in the world in recorded human history has figured out how to have a sustainable system of governance. All systems are exploiting another to sustain themselves, and when that exploited group is exhausted a cycle of exploitation repeats or the nation collapses.

If you live long enough, you’ve been through a number of bubbles. For me thats:

• Black Monday (1987)
• Dot com bubble (2000) which also bled into 9/11 economics impacts
• Great Recession (2008)
• COVID (2020)

The next bubble will just be another. Economy will slow, value of most assets will drop. Jobs will be lost, homes foreclosed on…and then the recovery will begin again. We’ll look in the mirror shocked we survived it then in a few years we’ll completely forget about it and be terrified of the next bubble.

So, prepare by living within you means, take care of yourself and your loved ones, and just be ready to weather the next storm. We’ll get through that one too.

Imperialism, however, is self-defeating, and the rate of profit is lowering while there aren’t really new markets to plunder anymore. This causes crisis.

Potentially yes, but empires can last for hundreds or thousands of years. Democracy is relatively young by comparison, and we’re already seeing large cracks in it in the USA, one of the older democracies.

The point being: humanity hasn’t yet found a long term stable form of government.

It’s not particularly outlandish to orient the economy around collectivized production and distribution based on need, rather than profit. Socialist countries already exist, and achieve good results compared to peer countries. They require working class organization, which is a difficult but possible process.

I’m interested in your perspective on this. Which socialist country are you using as an example of what you describe above?

Honestly it doesn’t matter if ABC returns Kimmel and his show to air. The exercise (fascist politicians exerting their influence through the oligarchy to punish critical speech) has served its purpose (to be a chilling effect on anyone with the mind to speak truth to power).

I think its the opposite from your take. The fascists got knocked down and now look weak. Other organizations that try to capitulate now see there’s backlash that happens and should be more emboldened to reject the fascist demands.

If you know not only what a torque wrench is, but how to use it properly you will likely have no trouble changing brake pads.

The feeling I get is that auto work goes much much deeper though, and I am interested in resources that offer that knowledge.

Full engine rebuilds, or even troubleshooting intermittent CANbus issues, sure. But basic maintenance like brake pads or changing out a failed alternator just require basic hand tools and some minor knowledge you can get from youtube.

Replacing brake pads (not shoes for drum brakes) is a fairly straight forward activity and possibly one of the best (besides perhaps changing engine oil) to perform yourself. Youtube is a great place to start. You can likely even find a full video of pad replacement for your exact model of car.

What is your current knowledge with using basic hand tools such as screwdrivers, hammers, and wrenches (for hex head fasteners)? Do you know how to replace a flat tire? There’s lots of overlap with that procedure and changing brake pads.

How much of the hardware and software you use must be registered, requires internet access to work, a proprietary app? You don’t actually own anything that fits in those categories and they can be taken away from you at the manufacturer’s whim.

While there are certainly commercial versions of those that fall into those categories, there are many that don’t.

• My 3D printer from Monoprice has a power plug and and SD card slot. No requirement to connect it to the internet at all for it to function.
• Here are 7 FOSS CAD software packages that aren’t own by any company.
• There are countless NFC and Wifi modules that don’t require a “call home” to the vendor that can’t be turned off. Cell modems may be a special case because you’re using a providers network.
• There are lots of large format printers that, once the drivers are install, need zero network connections to operation. No vendor shutoff possible unless you allow it.
• Same for CNC machine. Certainly at the high end industrial scale this may be different, but there are many of solutions for home and commercial users that don’t require an always-on connection.

As I said, "good foundation for future growth, but even then you can buy boards and even a couple of laptops right now with RISC-V CPUs:

Yes, you can definitely do all those things, but they’re far outside of the realm of a normal consumer, and unless you know, to look for those things. It’s a lot harder to find.

I’m confused by your premise then. If you’re saying “Today’s consumer electronics can’t be tinkered because they require specialized knowledge.” I’d argue that was always the case. How much tinkering could be done to an Atari 2600 from 1977?

How much tinkering would be done to a VHS VCR from 1989 without specialized knowledge?

These are prime examples of prior generations of consumer electronics.

Thought of this the other day. I bet a lot of us are like this, because in today’s world a lot of things we used to tinker with are gone (electronics are made to be single use and unfixable, cars are proprietary and can rarely be modified or worked on without many many thousands of dollars now, etc).

I feel the exact opposite. Today I can tinker in ways I never ever could before for two reasons:

1. so many more technological solutions exist

• 3D printing
• CAD
• wireless (near field, Wifi, and cell network)
• large format printers for paper, vinyl, and fabric
• CNC for wood and metal cutting

2. components are so cheap relative to the past

• single board computers (Arduino, ESP32, RaspberryPi, etc)
• high quality optics and CCD cameras
• mountains of cheap storage
• small and large LCD displays, eink

When I started out the cheapest computer was today’s equivalent of about $2000. To be able to buy a whole computer in a Raspberry Pi zero for $10 is insanely awesome! Electronic components from Radio Shack were few and very expensive. Test equipment like oscilloscopes were simply out-of-reach financially. Now I have a handheld one I bought for $200.

This is an amazing time to be alive with tinkering!

Open source hardware is the bigger issue

We have more open source hardware today than has ever existed. Prior to RISC-V boards you can buy right now every single CPU available was closed source. Further, RISC-V is cheap which means it is a good foundation for future growth and scaling.

Torbjörn Granlund, principal author of GMP, told The Register, "AMD is (again) replacing my CPU. They are collecting detailed information on my system and the load I ran when it died.

This is the critical piece of info. AMD is standing behind the product and replacing the failed part for the customer. Moreover, it sounds like AMD is interested in digging into why this is happening and not just sweeping it under the rug.

…or they tell other non-parent adults what they can do or say around their children.

I absolutely agree that certain language and behavior shouldn’t be around young children, but then that means there must be child-free places allowed for adults to do these things with other adults.

I would think TSMC is in the drivers seat here. They could say “not interested in intel, thanks anyway. Tariff away if you want, but we are the only ones that can make the chips you want so you’ll pay for it anyway”.

TSMC could also counter threaten to close down the newly built TSMC fabs built in the USA as retaliation if new tariffs are put in place.

The workarounds are interesting: link

Both workarounds would appear to do stuff that retriggers HAL detection. So something about the config must get broken, and only HAL redetection is needed to bring the VMs back to life. Now I’m really curious what the underlying bug/problem is.

Have you ever compared systems from back then on how well they actually worked? For sure the PC was awful. AND MS-DOS was the worst OS in existence at the time.

Yes, I lived through that period and have firsthand experience.

Most of those architectures you mention were workstation, server, or mainframe class

No

I think you missed the part of my post where I called out PPC 601 and Moto 68000 in desktops. PPC was also in workstation and server grade machines including IBM iSeries Midrange systems.

I don’t understand how you can argue a point that X86 was ever any good, have you ever tried programming assembly on it and on any of the competitors?

You’re still arguing technical superiority, when that isn’t the primary factor for folks that bought computers. Consumers didn’t want to throw away their entire computer and software library when going to the next iteration of a company’s product. PC Clones made PC computing affordable. Commodore with its Amiga fought against its only clone Atari ST. Apple quickly squashed any Mac clone makers. These companies got greedy because they wanted to sell hardware at a premium price and control their entire ecosystems, just like they before on prior platforms. They starved their pipeline of younger/poorer customers that would eventually be able to afford the premium products. PC had no such issue and won the computing war of the 80s and 90s.

From the little that I have read, their MT performance (or even TCO) isn’t really as great as some of the early previews would lead one to believe…

TCO is “total cost of ownership” a very important piece to that in the future is power consumption. Energy prices are rising. This isn’t just the electricity consumed by the CPU but also the cooling needed to exhaust the heat. Many of these highest performance x86 CPUs will cost substantially more to operate as the energy prices continue to rise.

I just don’t see ARM being a universal silver bullet (a straight line upgrade from x86)

Its not there yet, but with Intel fumbling on this one, leaving AMD the only leader in the space, trading one company being dominate over the other doesn’t really serve us well. What I’m pointing out is that its not a “straight line” upgrade, but its curving ever more toward a non-x86 future.

and with SoftBank trying to extract more cash out of ARM, things could get interesting.

I agree which is why I keep making references to RISC-V where I think the future will likely go instead. However, ARM showed (the industry as a whole) that we don’t need to stay with x86 forever as was the notion before. As in, “if we’ve successfully shown we can replace x86 with ARM, what would prevent us from replacing ARM with something else? Not much”.