Yeah, that’s also what I see in my home country - Portugal - which even though it has a ton of electricity generated from renewables (outside draught years, the average is now around 75%, down to around 45% in draught years because so much of it is hydro) but electricity prices aren’t really down much.

The local scam, set up by the totally corrupt politicians we have around here, was to increase “connection to the network” fees and “administrative” costs, so for me who was an early adopter of things like LED lights and even chose the components of my PCs based partly on power consumption hence tend to use a below average amount of power, outside the Winter months (were I use a lot of power for heating, as houses here are shit in terms of thermal isolation), most months half my electricity bill is those costs and only half is the actual cost of the power consumed.

So even that way I described to work around the electricity providers in my last post is only partly useful around here because one pays quite a lot merelly for being connected - I suspect that’s the way politicians together with the largest power companies (the biggest of which being the privatized state power company, which “curiously” employs in highly paid positons lots of politicians from the two main political parties here and is suspect in at least one large corruption case going through the courts) came up with to make sure than in a country with a lot of sun people didn’t just move en masse to self-generation with solar panels: unless one can generate enough to satisfy one’s needs the whole year, day and night (which means not just having more panels, but also sufficient power storage), one still needs a connection to the grid for times when self generation is not enough, and merelly having that connection is expensive.

Unsurprisingly solar self-generation in Portugal - the country in Europe whose capital has the most hours of sunshine of all European capitals - is way below even countries with far worse conditions for it, like Germany.

This is part of what I meant when I talked about the “inertia” in the system: in countries like Belgium and Portugal there’s also a lot of “bought laws”, “bought politicians” and other forms of entrenchment of such big businesses that have nothing to do with free markets and are used to the delay the transition so as to protect the profits of those businesses (and the board memberships and consulting fees they give the politicians).

Normal people then suffer because they’re still paying a lot for something that’s way more cheaper to produce than before.

Compare this with for example Finland, were you can actually get paid (I KID YOU NOT!) for using power at certain times of the day during Summer because there is so much power generation due to renewables that wholesale market prices turn negative and consumers with the kind of contract that fully exposes them to those prices will thus even get such extreme upsides of renewables as getting paid for using power.

This shit will eventually at least partially correct itself one way or the other (for example things like balcony solar will add further pressure for change) but it might take decades and meanwhile the gains of cheaper power generation due to renewables will keep being mostly captured by a handful of people which indirectly does things like delaying EV adoption because people who like you try using EVs (I don’t even have a car because I refuse to get one and can live without one) don’t really gain from having an EV instead of an ICE.

The consequences of the rot at the very top of politics in the Neoliberal age have far more widespread and long-lasting impacts that the it had back in the times when its was merelly people in the city hall getting a brown envelope with money for “expediting” some building license.

The crash in the cost of Renewables is taking care of that.

There are 3 main kinds of energy use in the West:

• Things that use electricity, which nowadays includes EVs
• Things that use oil or one of its derivatives, which nowadays is mainly ICE vehicles.
• Things that use gas or one if its derivatives, which nowadays is mainly cooking and home heating.

Only the first one gains from the current trend for ever cheaper electricity from Renewables which is ongoing: for example only a few years ago Gas Power Generation was cheaper than Solar, but now its now anymore.

So to fully take advantage of that trend, as much as possible of power usage in the Economy needs to be Electricity use rather than other sources of power (other renewables too are useful, but it’s in electrical power generation that we are seeing the stronger and most sustained fall in costs).

What you’re seeing in Electricity prices in many countries in Europe still being high is the inertia due to installed infrastructure (I bet Belgium still has lots of Gas Power Plants and buys lots of power from French Nuclear Power Plants) delaying things like fully taking advantage of, for example, very low solar panel costs. Also the installed generation industries are trying to delay the march of renewables - for example France has been for ages blocking the construction of power connection bringing cheaper power from renewables from the Iberian Peninsula to the rest of Europe because it would compete with their own sales of Power generated by their Nuclear Power Plants.

Still, for some there are ways to go around it, though depending on one’s own condition - for example if you have your own house, and your car is there for at least part of the time of the day when there is daylight, getting solar panels to help charge that EV makes a lot of sense because one can feed the other directly and that power is at cost (which is basically just the cost of buying and installing the panel) rather than being the 4-times more expensive than wholesale power you get from a retail electricity supplier.

Anyways, the trend in Electricity is for it to get cheaper. The trend in Oil is for it the get more expensive (as the easier to get to reserves get depleted and harder and more costly to extract or process stuff such as tar sands gets used) and the same for Gas but slower (since there are far vaster gas reserves than oil), so it makes some sense in the mid and long term to get the biggest power consumers at home to be using Electricity.

The funny thing is that the answer to the wests failures is literally just to be more like China. Central planning in vital sectors like infrastructure and transportation. Instead we just have a ruling class that wants to burn oil and start wars with countries that aren’t attacking us.

That would require giving up on the ultra-liberal reduced-state no-regulation orthodoxy which has put so much power in the hands of Money and money in the pockets of Politicians.

The entire top of the current Western power structures is against it, hence we’re going down the route of Collapse Through Stagnation.

Yeah, this whole thing sounds a lot like a section of horse-drawn carriage industry going down the route of committing suicide by using crooked politicians to try and stop the march of evolution via legislation rather that the route of adapting to an unstoppable change and thus surviving.

In 20 years time most of the companies pushing for this will be either be gone or become cottage shops and this shit will almost certainly also have negatively impacted the rest of the industry in Europe.

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.

America has long wasted tons of its military budget in things with tiny or even no Return On Investment in terms of additional effectiveness for every extra dollar spent.

In a sense the greatest enemy of the US is itself, in the form of the MIL and Corruption from the lowest levels to the highest.

I mean, notice the recent change in the budget for the military which this year removed the Right To Repair for the Military, something which does nothing other than hinder Military effectiveness whilst further enriching military hardware suppliers.

The way the money is misused and redirected to feather the nests of large military companies’ shareholders and CxOs, as well retired Procurement Generals who move to cushy jobs in the very companies they bought overpriced items from and MIL-friendly politicians in subcommittees approving white elephant military projects, is sort of a twisted mirror version of what happened in Russia were everybody in positions of power was on the take and their military when finally faced with a proper adversary at the same technological level - in the form of Ukraine - turned out to be a lot less than it seemed on paper.

Also America went down a route similar to Germany in WWII when they went for tanks like the Tiger Panzer which were peak-tech and very costly to manufacture, which the Allies countered by just throwing lots and lots of not-quite-as-perfect yet much cheaper and faster to manufacture tanks like the Sherman at it.

America has the biggest military budget in the World by a large margin, but also outright wastes a huge fraction of it and pays top premium for small incremental improvements, so the results aren’t as impressive as one would expect from just looking at money spent.

If you want to see efficient use of a military budget, look at Ukraine.

Well, it does make some sense that China’s plan’s to counter the US during an invasion of Taiwan would focus on nullifying America’s main far-from-home force projection method, which has for decades been fighter planes and cruise missiles launched from naval assets 1000km plus off the coast of the target nation.

Since the US has been using the same overall strategy again and again for decades now, China would have had lots of time to develop counters for it, and it’s not as if Chinese Engineering is any less than Western Engineering.

I mean, Russia too developed hypersonic missiles exactly to counter that very same American strategy. Now, Russia is well in range of lots of land-based assets of America’s allies in Europe so it could be targeted by those, but that’s not at all the case for China which America has to approach by sea, and that will be done with the usual Aircraft Carrier Group and hence that’s exactly what China would have set itself up to counter.

At one point President Obama had the definition of “enemy combatant” be changed to “Any man between the ages of 16 and 60” because the numbers of “collateral” civilian casualties from the drone attacks he ordered were so bad.

“Enjoy the once in century experience of empire collapse from the first row, go sightseeing to ‘once grand but now little more than decrepit and fast fading façades’ and return home with a warm ‘at least it’s not us’ feeling (return trip might be from El Salvador) unlike the poor sods who live in the place”

They’re gonna Ratchet Effect the shit out this!