Most desktop 3D printers are Chinese. The American ones (made in China) mostly went away because they cost 10x as much, were near impossible to repair, and some were drowning in DRM.

If American companies don't stop phoning it in and demanding huge margins (or running with terrible efficiency), they will be left behind.

I wouldn't say it soared. I would say that it recovered a bit, because the market had previously overcorrected. It is still below its highest March 2024 close, and barely half of its peak price.

As I understand it, most ARM devices don't have anything like BIOS/EFI/UEFI/Open Firmware to provide information about what hardware is present, so you configure the OS with a custom device tree file that provides that info instead. Some server hardware actually does have UEFI (SBBR), so presumably could support a truly generic boot image, I think, but someone more familiar with it may correct me on that point.

Sure they do. Ampere Altra Max has 128 cores of ARM goodness. The benchmarks show it mostly running about half the speed of recent AMD and Intel offerings, and actually beating the Xeon in some tests, but using significantly less power to do it (resulting in better performance per watt).

And with more and more server workloads depending on outboard GPUs and TPUs for most of the interesting workload, raw server CPU performance is likely to take a back seat to power consumption anyway at some point.

There definitely *is* at least one organism since plants and animals incorporated mitochondria and choloroplasts where the mix reproduces. It's a nitrogen fixing organelle. https://news.ucsc.edu/2024/04/... I believe that Mixostricha paradoxia is also one (with two different incorporated organisms), but I'm not totally sure. There are probably others.

Actually, I believe that's false. I think Mixostricha paradoxia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is a counter-example.

FWIW, we probably have no real idea of just how common this kind of thing is. It's clearly rare, but just *how* rare? There are lots of tiny beasties living in various niches that we haven't looked carefully at.

If a manufacturer knows that a system has a specific defect that makes it dangerous to use in certain contexts, it is usually obliged by law to report those circumstances. The license agreement is not necessarily considered legally binding or protective where there is a case of wilful neglect. Deliberate actions are not treated the same as lack of awareness or even negligence. But even negligence may be treated unsympathetically by the courts, no matter what customers sign up to.

Given that this defect could have left exposed critical infrastructure, banks, and businesses whose work is in the national interest, one might even be able to argue a case that this gave succour to hostile powers.

The most probable outcome is nothing happening. Companies are risk-averse and Microsoft has expensive lawyers. But a class action suit for wilful endangerment isn't wholly impossible, and I could see the DOJ investigating whether laws were broken, but only after the election.

They *are* making them. The dealers are not *selling* them. And if the dealers aren't selling them, they're not going to make larger quantities of them. And as I said, the dealers have every reason to *not* want to sell them. They don't make nearly as much money off of EVs on an ongoing basis, because they require far less service (fewer major malfunctions, no oil changes, fewer brake jobs, etc.).

Also, unionized car companies are under heavy pressure from the unions to drag their heels on EVs because there are fewer parts to put together, and the cars require less human labor to build, which means fewer workers. (Pedantically, they don't require significantly less human labor, but a big chunk of the labor shifts to the battery manufacturers.)

No conspiracy is needed. The car manufacturers have unions pushing them on one side to not make EVs and their dealer network pushing them on the other side to not make EVs. What possible incentive, other than being compelled to do so by law, could possibly get them to build more EVs that cost more (and by extension, will sell fewer units even in an ideal world) under those circumstances?

In this case, it sounds like it might be a good idea to invest a couple of bucks in using certified mail with a return receipt.

War doesn't always start with a clear-headed, cold-blooded weighing of national interests. In fact I'd say that's the more the exception than the rule. Historically it's quite common for a country to start a war that in retrospect looks stupid from the standpoint of national interests.

Of course peaceful initiatives can be just as badly thought ought. We quite *deliberately* chose to tie our economy to China; I remember this quite distinctly. Although nobody anticipated the speed or completeness of the interdependency that would folow, everybody understood that we were choosing to head that way. The argument was a purely ideological one, whether interdependency per se was a *good* thing. And, as far as it goes, the argument was sound. If you don't nitpick too much, it worked out just as planned.

The thing that we really didn't put much thought into was *who it was we were choosing to become interdependent with*. China is, not to put too fine a point on it, an unstable and very dangerous powder keg. There is no rule of law; laws are enforced selectively by officials tied to an unaccountable and unrestrainable political party. There is no freedom of information, which means among other things you don't get economic data you can trust. The system is prone to sudden, opaque power shifts and the emergence of strong men who are legally, and sometimes politically unrestrained with respect to policy and military affairs.

And now we'd really like a little more distance from that powder keg, but our interdependence is the main thing that's stabilizing the situation. At least in the short term, until somebody does something that, in restrospect, will look really stupid. Which is inevitable, eventually.

Well, the summary was a bit obscure. Was the espionage just spreading information or was it sabotaging it? Either or both are possible.

Consumer goods? Sure.

Machinery, industrial equipment, and so on? Not even close on the high end.

But it's within spitting distance for midrange, and enough for almost applications, at a fraction of the cost.

Presumably critters evolved to deal with noises that naturally and regularly occur in their native habitats.

This doesn't mean that natural noises that aren't regularly part of their normal habitat can't harm them. It's possible that animals whose range naturally overlaps the periodical cicadas do get harmed by that noise, but the harm is not significant enough to exert selective evolutionary pressure.

So natural isn't necessarily benign. Nor, do I think, is *unnatural* necessarily harmful. But dose does makes the poison, and cars do make a *lot* of noise. It's pretty well established that humans overexposed to car noise can develop health problems like cardiovascular disease. Since CVD mainly kills and disables people after their reproductive years, don't expect populations to evolve a biological tolerance for car noise though.

If you're going to assert "won't" instead of "can't", you're effectively asserting a conspiracy: despite the clear and apparent benefits to EVs, these companies are refusing to make them. That's a fairly bold claim I'd like to see substantiated.

The alternative is that they can't make them (while being cost efficient/marketable and/or reliable).

Those are the options.

He's moving some assets into US companies because they're innovative. Fair enough.

He thinks they're innovative because they've got more hustle. OK. That's almost circular.

He thinks they've got more hustle because Americans work longer hours. That doesn't follow at all.

Sometimes you work longer hours because the boss forces you to, and you are giving him as little for the time as possible. Sometimes you work longer hours because you're disorganized, bad at planning and managing your time. I've seen that often enough. If hours worked equals hustle equal innovation, he should be putting his money into Cambodia, where workers put in 40% more hours per year than Americans. Sweden and Switzerland rank higher than the US in the Global Innovation Index, even though people in those countries work a *lot* less.

Innovation for a country is multifactorial. Wealth and education matter. Attractiveness to foreign investment; rule of law; those are really important things where America excels. Even sheer size makes a difference; being part of a massive integrated market is a huge boost to both the US and the EU. Sure, work ethic matters, but work *hours* is a lousy proxy for that. In some countries people put in six hours of honest hard toil each day then go home. Do they have less work ethic than a country where people spend ten hours a day at work but much of that "lying flat"?