But there are plenty of people who get actual enjoyment out of early adopting and playing with tech. Don't judge what brings other people joy,

He's not judging them for what brings them joy, he's judging them for:

> Friends who took out tech loans from the university at 9% interest for a new gaming rig that was outdated in 3 years, and are still paying it back.

Given his uid, he ain't that young either. 9% is a punishing rate of interest and yeah it was a bad decision to blow that much at that point, if they are STILL trying to pay it off.

You struck a nerve with me, I today sold an RTX2080 for 1/4 what I bought it for. Do I regret the purchase? Not for one second. Do I think I would be better off having waited 3 years? Not for one second. Using something I bought is not the same as having money disappear from a bank account.

If you financed it at 9% and are still paying it off, you're pretty much renting it and money is disappearing from your bank account. Even worst is you can't pay back most of the principle by selling it since they devalue so fast.

I say this as someone who also bought an RTX2080Ti and AMD Ryzen 9 3900X when they were latest gen. And also don't regret it (sitting at it right now). And even got some RGB fans because I liked the look even if they don't increase airflow.

Bit I could buy it outright in cash, not finance it at 9% and then take forvever to pay it off.

I have literally no idea what you are talking about now.

I'm not saying "Y is bad"

You literally did about the USA, UK and Germany. I'm not sure why you're saying you aren't it given the strength of your words and you've written exactly the same sentiment again.

or accusing baron_yam of anything.

This entire thread was spawned from a comment Baron_Yam made and you responded to. If you're saying that nothing you say draws any context from the previous posts in the thread it's kind of hard to have a coherent conversation.

Israel and everyone that helped them is in the wrong, full stop.

Yes... but this is not really relevant to the conversation except in the context of you bringing it up to show how bad the US is, which is ultimately in response to Baron_Yam saying all thing considered he'd pick the US over China. Something I also agree with.

If you want the moral high ground,

Who are you even debating with here?

what moral high ground are you referring to?

Are you saying you would prefer to live in China to the UK? I would not. The regime there is not to my taste at all. You well know I'm frequently critical of the UK government too, and I would not want to live somewhere where that isn't an option. I'd last about 5 minute before being disappeared and having my organs harvested.

If that's the moral high ground in your book, then fine I'm taking the moral high ground for whatever it's worth. Given you ducked the question, and are also often criticial of our esteemed government, I suspect you'd take the same stance too.

So seriously, what are you trying to say?

No, but I also don't deal in simple oppression-o-meter rankings either.

Thing is, your response to someone saying "X is bad" is saying "well Y is bad too". I don't really see how that's much difference, as it is essentially comparative: Unless you are looking to compare, why bring up Y when the subject is X?

I'm more interesting in the hypocrisy, rather than the argument that "we are bad, but not as bad as them!" How about not being bad at all?

Saying "Y is bad too" also doesn't advance the argument of how you make X better, so I would say you're adopting a very similar position. I mean I agree that saying "we're better than China" isn't exactly selling the place, and saying "We're better than China so we have nothing to improve" is insane, but no one was saying that.

I don't see how Baron_Yam was being a hypocrite either. Would you choose living in China over the UK? Even given the considerable restrictions of freedom (not to mention organ harvesting and genocide against its own citizen)? I would choose the UK in a hearbeat, even though the UK is supplying arms to Israel.

Because fundamentally I have to choose one, and that means yes, you do need to rank them and pick the best. There is not hypocrisy there.

Oh look it's a stooge of Putin. Are you getting paid or are you dumb enough to do this for free from another country.

Tell me, why does Russia get to call the shots about what Ukraine does in its own borders? Ukraine is a sovereign country is it not? Do you think Russia would let Finland, Norway, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland or Latvia tell it what do do within its borders?

No.

There's a reason all of Russia's neighbours want to sign up to NATO, it's because most of them remember what it was like being ruled by Russia and they have no desire to return to it. They can also see that the ones that failed to sign up and believed Russia's promises of nonaggression, like, er, Ukraine, get invaded.

Try taking a billboard out criticising Xi Jinping and Biden and see how you fare.

Neither country has a clean record but are you honestly arguing that the US is as oppressive as China?

No country has a perfect record on freedom. To equate the US and China in terms of freedoms though is somewhere beyond daft.

One of the two is not currently engaging in genocide against a religious minority population, after all. Among many other things.

"glass houses" used like this turns rapidly into being unable to criticise anything at all unless you're perfect, which handily means no one can criticise anything since no one is perfect.

Until, well about now they has been no socketed form factor for LPDDR. SODIMM just doesn't have the electrical spec to slow for it. The impedance of the contacts is too variable for the very low voltages sand high frequencies. This is why the new form factor has a much higher contact pressure. Also it's easier to get consistent trace lengths which helps too.

This isn't a grand conspiracy, laptops with SODIMM have serious power draw penalties.

You are reading a lot into my comment that wasn't there.

What do you think I'm reading into it? I'm saying specifically I do not think you would have made a comparable comment to any other ethnic minority. If a different ethnic minority had told you their thoughts on the divide between ethnicity and religion in their world, would you have dragged in comments about how some very distantly related people are doing something different?

it didn't work as well as dealing with the root causes of it. So let's deal with the root causes.

The "root causes" aren't what the Israeli government is doing. Anti-semitism is not new. And besides this just amounts to "well suck it up".

Your point about being an observant Jew vs and ethnic one is just a question of semantics.

You were specifically talking about protections about discrimination based on religion vs ethnicity. The semantics of what constituted religion or not are fundamental to that discussion, IMO.

If the intent is to boycott the Jewish religion

I don't know what you mean specifically by that. Do you mean not doing Jewy things or refusing to interact with practicing Jews?

say because it practices genital mutilation,

Not all Jews circumcise. There's such a thing as the liberal sect. And Jews without kids. And would you be happy for someone to "boycott" Jews for that but not Americans (estimated 80% circumcised)?

actual Zionists

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. For real, you pretty much ignored every point I made about it without comment. And you won't define what you think an "actyual Zionist" even is. It's turning into Schrodinger's Zionist being somehow widespread, but also with a set of views that's impossible to pin down but probably extreme.

"Actual Zionists" say all sorts of things. There's a wide spectrum of them, especially if you include all definitions of what a Zionist might be.

If you're going to protest circumcision, don't protest Jews. Protest circumcision. It is not universal inside and certainly not nonexistent outside. Don't use it as an excuse to inaccurately target a religious or maybe ethnic group.

Um also, why didn't you mention Muslims? Circumcision is common there too and there's a heckuva lot more musliums than Jews.

So yeah, I'm going to say that is someone is boycotting just Jews because of circumcision then they are an antisemite using an excuse to target Jews.

Well you've certainly proven you're number one at dragging culture wars into every unrelated thread and not being able to shut up about gender for five minutes.

If you're so bothered about gender identity and thinking about it this much you might find Twitter to be more to your taste than slashdot.

I think you have very much misunderstood his point. He's not saying that Jews are unique in being able to hide their ethnicity, nor unique in benefiting when we do so. What he's saying that the attitude to that from outside is often different for Jews. If a mixed race person can pass as white and chooses to do so, it's generally acknowledged (especially by the progressive left, which is the point of view the book is written from) that this is a bad thing because they should not have to hide their race in order to be treated decently.

With Jews the attitude has been much more "well what's the problem you can pass as white so you're fine".

Regarding Zionism, two things. First...

Imagine I was taking to someone from a Shia Muslim background. Let's say they mentioned racism and how religion and culture were somewhat intertwined. And I've responded "well black people also have racism. And what about 9/11 that was pretty bad. Did you know about the slavery in Saudi Arabia, also the Taleban are trying to wipe out an other religions in Afghanistan".

None of those things is wrong. Acknowledging them isn't inherently racist. But you'd sure as heck give me the side eye for that response. And that's not all that far from your response.

Think about it. I'm telling your your response was a bit weird and you are essentially pointing out it wasn't factually incorrect. You are arguing a different point.

As for Zionism, I think you are muddled about it. Many consider the state of Israel to be a colossal act of Zionism. Are you arguing that Jews were in more danger from 1948 onwards than before? That seems a stretch to me, frankly. If you want to argue that the settlers are armed thugs who all ought to be in prison, are making life worse for everyone, ought to be in prison and it's deranged they've been supported by the army for decades, you won't find disagreement here, but again, why did you bring it up?

As for religion. Like I said religion ethnicity and culture are not cleanly separable. It's a bad road to go down where done religions get special laws and freedoms not afforded to others and I am against that. But not protecting religion leads to absurdities. Consider the alternative.

Let's say I could be refused service for being an observant Jew, but not an ethnic one. Well how would anyone know? Would it be ok to refuse me service if they say me leaving a shul? But the thing is I am an atheist might well be seen leaving one after, say, a bar mitzvah. Yes that's a religious service, but to not go would be to renounce a large part of my culture and stick a huge middle finger up to my family.

Or if you prefer a non Jewish example, what about a attending a church wedding? That's a religious ceremony too.

If you allow free discrimination based on religious worship or gets utterly absurd and yet people have discriminated so protections are needed.

As always it's a fine line and they're are always edge cases and what you hear about will be 90% arseholes, because basically laws are for arseholes more or less. But just because something is hard and impossible to get right didn't mean that bit doing it is more wrong

Sure, but I'm not currently talking to those people. I know what broadly speaking people are bigoted and I know that people will latch onto events to flaunt their bigotry.

You're the one who jumped from me taking about my ethnicity to *but Zionists*. Would you have done the equivalent for any other group?

Anyway read the book. It'll be better reading than "10 years to save the west".

Hmm I have a house, a garden (not a yard), a bicycle, no car and regularly use public transport.

Not really sure what the problem is.

I'm not particularly angry, but I am pointing out in strong language what you are doing. If you want to understand, read David Baddiel's book on the subject.

Now bear in mind you've taken a very few steps to get from me saying in response to a comment about protecting religions "well ethnicity and religion in Jews is not well separated and racists don't care" to taking about Israel, Zionism (which you still aren't clear over) and the genocide. That's massively extreme, frankly.

Why? Why do you think this is relevant? I have no control over Israel. Any random American had more control than I do because they at least have as chance against voting for a representative who would cut aid. I'm not a citizen. I have no voting rights. I'm British.

This is very little different than all the usual suspects bringing up crime statistics, and cherry picking the worst examples of a very broad category in order to taunt the whole when people are criticising the police over violence against black people. You wouldn't do that, so why drag it in to this discussion?

Like I said get the book and read it. It is not long, it'll take your a few hours.

You would #notallmen if a woman talks about sexism. You wouldn't bring up slave labour in Saudi Arabia if a Muslim talked about Islamophobia. If a black person was talking about experiences of racism you wouldnt "well akshually" and start pointing out others who have worse racism. If a Chinese person did, would you segue nearly into the Uyghur genocide which is also ongoing. All I ask is that your extend the same courtesy to the Jews.

Motor vehicle pollution is still a massive cause of illness and death.

Better than massively totally fucking awful can still be pretty terrible.

As for the worrying about poor people, they have lower car ownership and tend to live in cheaper places which often means closer to pollution. And besides, the average car price is about $48k and there are EVs for under 30.

I think ICE cars should be taxed heavily and the extra tax should be used to offset vehicle pollution related healthcare costs and the knock-on economic costs of having sick workers. Anything less is freeloading!