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Comment Re:When dictators lead in innovation (Score 1) 61

Despite their issues, I think China supplanting the US as the world's largest economy is pretty much a given at this point. While the remaining western governments, quite rightly, have reservations over how trustworthy and reliable China might be as an economic partner, the reality is that's just a matter of degrees and ultimately every country is mostly looking out for #1. The only difference is the lengths they are prepared and able to go to achieve their aims; some much more so than others.

Establing sensible international trade agreements without loopholes you can sail a carrier group through don't happen overnight, no matter what tariff threats you might make to expedite the process, and similar timescales are needed to remodel global trading routes at scale too. With the US now demonstrably proving that as long as MAGA has any meaningful say in US politics they are no longer either a reliable or trustworthy partner to the west, any western government not already making overtures to re-arrange their exports and establish trade agreements around a more China-centric global economy in fairly short order has probably left it too late, IMHO.

Comment This is Ricardoâs theory of rent (Score 4, Interesting) 48

In case you never took that course, the classical economist David Ricardo figured out that if you were a tenant farmer choosing between two lots of land, the difference in the productivity of the lands makes no difference to you. Thatâ(TM)s because if a piece of land yielded, say, ten thousand dollars more revenue per year, the landlord would simply be able to charge ten thousand more in rent. In essence landlords can demand all these economic advantages their land offers to the tenant.

All these tech companies are fighting to create platforms which you, in essence, rent from them. Why do you want to use these platforms? Because they promise convenience, to save you time. Why do the tech companies want to be in the business of renting platforms deeply embedded in peopleâ(TM)s lives? Because they see the time theyâ(TM)re supposedly saving you as theirs, not yours.

Sure, the technology *could* save you time, thatâ(TM)s what youâ(TM)d want it for, but the technology companies will inevitably enshittify their service to point itâ(TM)s barely worth using, or even beyond that if they can make it hard enough for customers to extract themselves.

Comment Re: This is why we need public health insurance (Score 4, Informative) 110

You should be careful of taking the claims of the Chinese Communist Party at face value. China has universal health insurance, but it is administered in a way that many people canâ(TM)t access critical care *services*.

For example if you are a rural guest worker in a city, you have health insurance which covers cancer treatment, but it requires you to go back to your home village to get that treatment, which probably isnâ(TM)t available there. If you are unemployed you have a different health insurance program, but its reimbursement rate is so low that most unemployed people canâ(TM)t afford treatment.

Authoritarian governments work hard to manage appearances, not substance. This is a clear example. It sounds egalitarian to say everyone has the same health insurance, but the way they got there was to engineer a system that didnâ(TM)t require them to do the hard work of making medical care available to everyone.

If you want an example of universal healthcare, go across the strait to Taiwan, which instituted universal healthcare in the 90s and now has what many regard as the best system in the world.

Comment Re:'murica proving to the rest of the world (Score 1) 118

Transactional doesn't mean anything without consistency. To my mind the worst damage this administration is doing is to themselves in the longer term. What's the point of making any concessions for a deal at all if it will just not honor it? By defanging any oversight, and make itself its own enforcer, other parties really have no foundation upon which to assume that negotiated terms mean anything at all..

Comment Re:Morbo Voice: (Score 3, Interesting) 192

You've also got the waste heat from power generation and transmission required to power all the ACs that plug into the mains and draw their power from the grid. If an AC is powered by locally connected solar or whatever that's going to be pretty insignificant, but the rest are going to add up. The laws of thermodynamics totally apply, which means you are not magically moving heat from A to B in a zero sum game, you're consuming power to do it, and that means more waste heat in addition to the losses in the system through inefficiencies.

Cities are already microclimates and mass AC adoption is absolutely going to cause an aggregate, and almost certainly measurable, temperature increase across that microclimate, and especially so in narrow streets where there is limited airflow to disperse that extra heat. If the heatwave is already making outside temperatures unhealthy then adding another degree or whatever on top of it to help keep interiors cool via AC is going to really suck for those who are forced to go outside in it for whatever reason.

A better solution, given climate change has been a thing for decades, would have been to look at how pre-AC civilizations in equatorial regions built very efficient ways of keeping interiors cool passively in extreme heat and adopted those techniques in anticipation of hotter summers for any new builds over (realistically) the last 20-30 years. Hindsight, and naive optimism the Paris Agreement et al would work, is a wonderful thing though and here we are - putting a band aid in place that will actually make the overall problem slightly worse.

Comment Re:Google (Score 3, Insightful) 7

So do it yourself. Honestly, this kind of kneejerk response is stupid. Is Google a good company? No. Does that mean everything they do is useless/untrustworthy? Also no.

You can fetch OSS Rebuild's SLSA Provenance:

$ oss-rebuild get cratesio syn 2.0.39

or explore the rebuilt versions of a particular package:

$ oss-rebuild list pypi absl-py

or even rebuild the package for yourself:

$ oss-rebuild get npm lodash 4.17.20 --format=dockerfile | docker run $(docker buildx build -q -)

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