partial_accumen

I’d need a reason to use Edge. If it used a different browser engine, that would be a compelling reason.

Thats the description of both Vivaldi and Brave browsers, which also haven’t out-Chromed Chrome. Both are Chrome engine with built in ad blockers.

Hey Microsoft, how about innovating instead? Edge is a Chrome engine browser like dozens of others out there. Why not write a new browser engine to give customers a choice? Or at worst, how about contract with Apple to license Webkit bringing a third solid choice for a browser engine to Windows. You’re not going to out-Chrome Google Chrome browser, so stop trying.

You can’t hand wave this problem away, saying you get what you pay for (also a common saying in the West). It’s systemic. Also, I’ve taken risks buying more expensive versions of the same products and had the exact same result.

…and…

So I ask you this: Was it the parents fault for feeding their babies contaminated baby formula? Should the people who installed toxic drywall have known better? Did the people who died from contaminated blood thinner deserve it for being poor consumers?

There’s another element of Chinese culture you’re missing and it is that of “miànzi” (面子) or “face” as in our version of the phrase “saving face”, or figuratively “reputation”. The sellers do care about their reputation, but there are different groups they care about and groups they may not. You’re likely a western end user retail customer. Most probably don’t care about you. They might care about their reputation with their western reseller customers though.

The examples of poison drywall or adulterated formula are very bad by both Chinese and Western standards, but for slightly different reasons. The western view it as bad because it harmed the end consumers. The Chinese view would be a loss of face of the seller for being such a public and shameless scam without integrity or honor, a huge loss of face.

No one seems to care in China. It’s like you say, making money is all that matters.

You’re close to understanding, but you’re still missing it. Again, you’re judging this by western standards. Now, I’m western, and I like the western standards, but I also understand that their culture doesn’t have to conform to ours for it to be “right”. There is no objectively right way to do this. We’re all different humans figuring different systems. I certainly have my preference for the western style, but that doesn’t make what the Chinese have been doing for hundreds (3000 thousand, if you ask the Chinese) of years they’ve been doing less “right”.

Let me tell you something: Toys made in West go through such testing. It was a lesson learned in blood over decades.

That’s a very recent addition to western culture. Lots of toys even during my lifetime were dangerous. Two generations back, in the USA we had toys like this which heated up to 260 °C (500 °F):

Which caused serious burns and even some deaths for the children playing with them.

In the 1950s this was a toy:

You’re bringing your perspective of individualism which is very much a Western idea. Other cultures don’t come from that perspective and arrive and different conclusions. I can tell you, we’ll see more of this press up on our western culture as trump continues to flounder our dominance and China continues to rise.

I’m also apply the same logic to Americans. If a USA of the future is the trumpian-style, I’d rather have a strong China to act as a check on US power. We, the USA, are a negative force on the world right now under trump.

I can go on and on about the poor quality of tons of Chinese-made products but you get the idea. Having said that, there’s plenty of great Chinese brands that make quality stuff. It’s just that there’s so much more cheap/generic stuff from China that competes with the good stuff it gets drowned out.

What you are experiencing is a different cultural approach that the west frequently fails to get what they expect. There’s a concept of “if you ask for bottom dollar prices, you’re going to bottom tier products”. Paraphrasing even further put another way “why are you complaining about getting junk when you’re only willing to pay junk prices?”. Get acquainted with the Chinese phrase “chàbuduō” (差不多). It literally translates to “a little bit less than all”, but figuratively translates to “close enough”. This is a very common phrase and idea in Chinese culture. If you’re buying the cheapest version of something you’re going to get a product that is likely not up to spec, but “close enough”. The second phrase you should know is “méi bàn fǎ” (没办法). This one figuatively translates to: “nothing can be done” or “it can’t be helped”. When you point out something isn’t up to what you expect, you should be ready to hear this phrase and understand that the person or company you’re dealing with isn’t interested in changing the situation and are simply washing their hands of the issue leaving you with it.

Neither of these are failings of Chinese culture, its just different. The failing would be expecting all other cultures to behave like our own.

If you don’t want the bad product, buy the more expensive version. As you said, you can absolutely get very high quality products from China, but you’re not getting those for a tiny fraction of the price of high quality goods from other sources.

To me this means the propaganda is stopping to work for increasing number of people.

I have different reading of the data. Essentially there are two superpowers today: USA and China. No one wants to be ruled by another country, but the dominant superpower has that power to shape policy around the world through military and economic actions.

What I’m seeing is that trump made the USA so unpalatable with his actions that China becomes the lesser of two evils. So its not so much that China’s bad behavior are erased, but given the choice of China or the USA leading the world, the world is rejecting the USA.

both militaries are relying on conscripts and mercenaries,

Sure, but not in equal measures. Russia’s causalities has been acknowledge by both sides to be significantly higher than Ukraine’s, and that was when Russia still had its Soviet stockpile now largely exhausted. Ukraine is getting resupplied by the west. Russia is getting resupplied by…North Korea?

Zelensky is fully fucked the next time Ukrainians bother to have a domestic vote.

Ukraine is much more than simply Zelensky. Euromaidan had nothing to do with Zelensky. I’m not aware of any groundswell of support of the Ukrainian people for capitulation to being conquered by Russia. I would think this would still mean a pro-Ukrainian anti-Russian president after Zelensky is out of office.

Both of their economies have tanked, with further economic pressures coming from the conflict with Iran and the climate change threat.

I agree, but Ukraine still has access to global markets for sales, and its new defense industries appear to be the hot item for global customers. Russia, which traditionally had a pretty good income from its defense industries has been wiped out with a multiprong situation of lack of manufacturing capacity to support its domestic weapons consumption while still providing units for export to derive income, and the poor performance of Russian systems on the battlefield make for a bad sales argument. If anything, China is poised to take over the space of defense industry that runs counter to the traditional western suppliers.

The issue isn’t whether one runs out first. It’s how long the political leadership can drag this forward before someone pops them and brokers a settlement that ends the bleeding.

With Russia that leadership is one man, Putin. I would imagine as soon as he’s gone the will to fight the war evaporates with him. With Ukraine, I’m not aware of any pro-Russian candidate that show any sign of a significant lead that would suggest pro-Russians take power in Ukraine.

But if Ukraine won’t negotiate without full return of territory (presumably even including Crimea, which is fully outside their political influence) and Russia won’t cede territory they’ve entrenched…

There is a big distinction between the primary fuel of the armies of Russia vs Ukraine.

• Russia is relying primarily on human meatwaves to take and hold ground.

• Ukraine’s army primarily runs on money. They buy western advanced weapons and invest in design and manufacturing of next-generation drone warfare (that has now become an income channel for Ukrainian arms exports to places like the Middle East). A year or two ago Ukraine shocked the world by holding positions for weeks and months with purely robotic guns. Just this week Ukraine offensively took and ground with only robots. Additional can be had with just more money.

Which one of these two do we think is going to run out first? The article we’re talking about is showing a $90B financial lifeline to Ukraine. I’m not seeing where Russia is going to get another 1,000,000 men to march into Ukrainian bombs and bullets to continue the war indefinitely.

Additionally Russia has largely exhausted its Soviet era stockpile of weapons, and the nation’s manufacturing capacity is not near enough to replace the losses as quickly as they are occurring. Yesterday’s Russian casualty numbers bear this out. 1 tank lost. 1010 men casualties.

“evil maid” attacks need to be renamed to “evil students” attack.

For some reason its very popular in Asia, according to my partner who is Thai and 23 years old.

Facebook subsidized mobile internet access specifically to facebook properties for a decade or so in many parts of the world. If you went to Google.com you’d get charged for mobile data. if you went to any Facebook company sites, it was free data. This is also why Whatapp is so embedded in many parts of the world. Text messages were charged, while Whatapp messages were free.

Even India assassinated a Canadian on Canadian soil. .

For ARM Linux comparison, I ran the Speedometer 3.0 benchmark the author uses on my daily driver Macbook Air M2 (24GB RAM) running Asahi Linux Fedora Remix 42 (KDE). I used FF 149 which is just what I had installed. It scored 22.0 which apparently was better than this Zenbook and even beat out several Ryzen 7 and Core i7 offerings:

A used M2 Air with my spec mine (24GB RAM 2TB SSD) is $800-$900, which is a fraction of the $1600 Asus wants for their slower unit new, but the Asus does have more RAM.

I like seeing more ARM based Linux laptops.

Yeah, send the couch fucker, that’ll surely get the people out to vote.

I’m hoping it will…for Orbán’s opponent Péter Magyar.

but I’d argue this is only because alternatives have been too effectively suppressed by the sociopaths benefiting from the status quo.

Can you talk about what are those effective alternatives that have been suppressed you are referring to as a replacement for the current IP scheme?

Do you want kids watching it too? How about Bluey throwing Nazi salutes or Paw Patrol using racial slurs? Even worse if you were looking to buy a legitimate cartoon for your kid, there would be nothing to tell you which you were buying. Anyone could claim full ownership of these characters and sell them doing horrible stuff and nothing you do as a parent could protect your kids unless you first bought each, then watched it yourself, before your kid watched it.

The entire notion of ‘Intellectual Property’ is a cancer on society.

Intellectual property is a term that wraps a whole bunch of things (copyright, trademarks, patents). Are you fully aware of the impact how abolishing all IP would negative affect society?

Copyright prevents the KKK from producing and selling Pokemon cartoons with Pikachu supporting stupid shit like white supremecy propaganda. Are you sure you want that protection gone?

Information and ideas intrinsically accrue value the more they’re known and used, and the incentives provided around their collation and attribution should embody that, not punish them with imaginary locks that provide ownership.

Lets just take the patents portion of IP for a moment. The first part of what you’re asking for here is exactly what patents do. To have something patented, the patent holder has to fully document the machine/process/method to create the patented item. This is that mechnism that enables the “more known and used”. Society gains this knowledge because the owner fully shares it. A design patent can last for only 14 or 15 years (depending on filing date). The longest type of patent (Utility) lasts only 20 years. After as few as 14 years everyone can use this knowledge without any fees/restrictions/payments.

This is a be-careful-what-you-wish for situation with what you’re asking for here. There are companies choosing NOT to file patents anymore and simply keep their methods secret. Since they methods aren’t patented they are under no obligation to ever share them publicly. There is a very real chance that many of these technologies/methods may be unknown to society at large for long after the term of normal patent protection would have expired and society would have been able to use the knowledge.

EDIT: I was trying to think of a good example of a company that agrees with your stance about not patenting and I remembered one. Elon Musk is choosing not to patent SpaceX rocket engines because it would force him to document how they work. Instead they are just keeping the designs secret. So your desire to not have patents used are advocating for what Elon Musk does.

This is “open” source and it was the main reason it got forked (lots of proprietary bits included as binary, impossible to send a PR, obfuscated code)

Wasn’t this methodology the whole reason GPL 2 evolved to GPL 3 because Tivo was doing this exact thing? They used the underlying open source free work of others, but then wrap their own contributions in priopriatry binaries not distributed with source code. This method wasn’t in violation of the letter of GPL rules even though it was clearly a violation of the spirit of the GPL rules.

How are they able to skirt the GPL 3 rules this time?

I certainly understand why folks don’t what that in their backyard. However, that sounds like a really great source of free heat to tap for commercial scale greenhouses in the winter time. I see theres a small deployment of this in Paris.