White gold perhaps?

Trump will need all the Crypto coins he can to create his new (white?) Trump tower in the location where the U.S. White House used to be...

I would also assume that cities in China are both large and (very) densely populated. ICE vehicles may sound way better than EVs, ICE does a lot worse regarding smell in comparison. So ,more people using EVs in China will have a directly noticeable uplift in air quality in those cities. And it will give lots of people a big reprieve in how they experience their health issues.

Noise pollution is also a large advantage of EVs, especially in (very) densely populated areas. The "rumble" of tires rolling over asphalt at speeds above 45 MPH is still noisy. But with EVs that is more or less the only source of noise pollution.

Granted, cities in the US and Canada are not designed to be densely populated or walkable, so ICE is likely to be experienced as less problematic regarding pollution by their populaces. Most cities outside the US never got rid of their densely populating facilities or their walkability. Also, more and more cities are rolling back changes they made to become more car-centric in order to restore walkability again. Better for the health of people, walkability also reduces city maintenance costs by a lot and walkability also leads to stores, bars, restaurants etc. to become more profitable.

So EVs will become more relevant for such cities and their populaces. ICE might be better for (really) long hauling of goods between distribution-centers, while the "last-mile" distribution will be done in clean EVs.

Nope, with Nazi bases in Hollow Earth instead...

With your statement "non-writable BIOS is non-functional" history will have to disagree. Because if that were true all computers before 2003 would never be usable. And I clearly remember computers being used in lots and lots of places, doing many diverse tasks. Besides that, before I had to enter in the draft, I got a temporary job in maintenance of bank computers and money counting machines. And I dealt with boatloads of these machines, as those were in rigid maintenance schedules.

Those devices used EEPROMs for BIOS, and I filled those on my workstation and then replaced the EEPROM in the machine. Yes, lots of manual steps in that job. But you know what didn't happen? Breaches of security via remote access of any kind.

I'm sure that remote access allows for much quicker deployment of large amounts of machines in an environment. But by enabling that into the subsystems of computers, you also opened up a way to breach those subsystems. And then the error was made to put Microsoft in charge of secure boot. Which it hasn't been, since its inception, as this is not the first and not the last time "Secure boot" will be compromised.

You are hopefully aware that Microsoft's mantra is and always has been: "profit > convenience > quality > security"

Is nuclear the solution?
Not if time is of the essence. But let's say there is no time requirement. A Chernobyl-like "nuke" is relatively quickly build. Would you want such a plant near your home? 95% of residents in the US wouldn't want such a plant. The risk is there, and you'll rob money from many people by diminishing their property values over night.

Now, I will say that a "nuke" is great for base-load, but that could be countered with the fact that these plants are infamous for their slowness adjusting the amount of energy to put into the grid.

Nah, the real game is energy-efficiency. What can be done by spending the least amount of electrical/fossil/nuclear energy possible. So, for example: using a simplest, most direct way to cook your food. Why not use a a very insulated stove that you could power with 1 small solar panel? With enough thermal mass, such an oven would remain hot even during the night to cook something you fancy. No grid power, no battery, no nothing except patience and discipline.

You may get away with adding a lot of insulation to your boiler, in order to reduce its power demands so drastically you might get away with powering it via just a simple heat element and a small-ish solar panel. Barely any transfer losses, barely any losses to turn one form of energy into another. All powered by non-moving parts that require very little maintenance. And it is power the grid doesn't have to deliver to your home, meaning it doesn't need to be generated, or distributed.
And you'll slowly find ways to do that with the other things you deem essential.

Doing more with less in the household. Because that is under your direct control. And once you'll get the hang of this notion, you might think up solutions on a bigger scale. A scale that could be interesting to your employer, or your own business, if that is more your thing.

The climate wins and you win and, if you have any, your children win too. Manage to do so and you'll gain true independence, little by little.

From what I understand is that the average energy consumption from an normal US household is about twice the energy consumption of the average from the (Western-)Europe household, which in turn is about 3 times the energy-consumption of households in 2nd-world countries. Only mention this to inform you that there is a f.ckton to gain in becoming energy-efficient. And what all of the above doesn't need is another new "nuke".

Since when can bible-thumpers envision a (human) history larger than 4000 years? Or is that just the US branches of bible-thumpers?
And yeah, I also include the progressive thumpers, who can acknowledge Earth's age of 6000 years.

18 Months for a "nuke", that is overly optimistic. I expect at least double that amount of time to let all the concrete dry out, let alone form it how it is needed to be. And no, most of that cannot be done off-site in several parts, all built at the same time. As that would be a logistical problem in the general area. And another big problem (transportation) of the elements that can be manufactured in other provinces/states.

Hinkley 2, that is a huge "nuke" in Great Britain, as replacement for Hinkley, the previous "nuke near that location. They are already 10 years in and as far as I know still not finished. And you'll need either a few very large plants or lots and lots of small plants, as energy demands remain terribly high.

And I would like the add the following thought:
The models being made by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc. are not energy efficient. Hence you'll need a lot of power just to create/train new models. Power that cannot be in 2 places at once. And with each iteration of model, the energy demands practically double. These companies need subscriptions to become (somewhat) profitable (hopefully). However, with energy limitations, do you send power to the companies building AI or to the users, so they can actually use the products on offer?

China's models focus on energy efficiency, so both the companies that create/train models can do so, while the users are also having enough power to use these models.

Energy-efficiency is the name of the real game here. It would mans you'll need only some 3 or 4 huge "nuke's" to cover both the creators and users, or a whole lot less smaller "nuke's" all over the country. Yet, there is only talk about MORE POWER to turn on datacenters containing MORE GPU, which need MORE POWER, because there needs to be MORE GPU shoved into any and every datacenter. That is a vicious circle you are entering, which will hurt both the creators and customers. And you can only hope that this doesn't occur with both at the same time. But with a shitty grid, that chance becomes a whole lot higher.

Energy-efficiency reduces that chance by at least one order of magnitude and gives the creators, customers and grid time to scale up with realistic targets. Now I'm aware that energy-efficiency is a curse word worse than the multiplication of the f.ck and c.nt curse words in the USA, however, it is the only game any nation busy with AI should be playing. Because if they don't, the AI bubble will pop sooner than later and consequences will be really damaging to their economy, possibly ravaging enough it will take a whole generation to rebuild. And there simply not enough time for that.

What do the military say: "go slow, slow is efficient, efficient is fast"? The current "panicky" trend hurts long term prospects so much more than most realize.

Yes, I do think that a charging cable should be included with any phone. My new phone I bought a month or 2 ago still had one. Honor is the brand, don't remember which model, it just needed to be cheap.

Yet I'm still using the charging cable I got with my previous phone, which is now 7 years old. Dropped that phone by accident quite few times, but was never a problem. Until 6 months ago, then it fell, not even that high and now its screen is cracked in 3 places. And that is the only reason I went out to get a new one as the old one still holds charge for a full day and a half with my normal usage pattern. Benefits of always charging via an USB port on my laptops or desktops, I'll guess. As this is not the only phone that lasted me this long. All my phones lasted 5 years at least and I never charged those either via chargers, only via USB charging cable attached to my laptops or desktops.

The charging cable I got with my Nokia 5530 (?, some dumb phone, designed to play music) I was still using it to charge my Nokia Windows Phone too. Only reason I stopped using that cable was because newer phones had a different charging port connector. And yes, I even used that Windows phone (made by Nokia, labeled as Nokia, not Microsoft) for 5 years. Still the phone I liked the most, but unsustainable because of a lack of apps. It did the rest just fine.

But I'm the exception to the rule, I'm told. I take care of my things, religiously. Hence this new trend will not hit me all that hard. However, I'm fully aware about my n=1 experiences and cannot expect anyone else doing the same. And as the manufacturer is the best candidate to provide the most compatible cable with their device right from the start, for barely any cost to them, why would they not include this cable with a new phone?

Can confirm, except in my case I used Proxmox. Just downloaded the HAOS (Generic x86-64), created a bootable USB drive with Balena Etcher, assigned that to the VM (hardware passthrough) and let the VM boot. The installer of HAOS will do its thing and soon after you will be able to access the web-interface from HA via whatever device in your LAN (or VLAN).

Almost forgot to mention: What I did beforehand was to assign a DHCP reservation in my DHCP server for this VM, in order to give this VM a static IP address, preventing the need to set up the VM itself with a static IP address. Run HAOS like this for at least 4 years this way. Only once had I a need to restore this VM from a backup (crappy extension that blew up after updating HA). For the rest, smooth sailing all the way.

Indeed, there is a dire need for serious punishments. But that alone isn't enough, those punishments will also have to be executed. And that is where political will more often than not falters (and keep billionaire's happy as a result).

The Tsar picked off a lot of land from China, back when Russia could. Russia is getting weaker, so the Chinese may still smile with Russia in the press, but don't think they'll smile when backs are turned. As I understand it, there seems to be a lot of minable resources in Siberia. Siberia is geographically closer to China than Moscow. And Siberia has really crap infrastructure, if there even is any form of infrastructure, which 90%.of the time not the case. East Russia and Mongolia, that area used to be called Manchuria.

China will want it back. And if they can, I would not give much for the fate of Korea (both North and South) as that nation will then be a very handy Peninsula for China as well. China and Japan don't like each other at all. But Japan enjoys some geographical help, which makes it more difficult for China to invade there. Strategically that move is not that beneficial either. Korea, however, is strategically interesting for China.

China will be happy to take Russia's energy for a dime on a Dollar. Keeps the US on their toes and Russia has income (so happy-ish), while remaining weak, so cheap energy for a long while for China. Geopolitical this plays out great for China. And now that the US is straining their investor's money with AI, China will give whatever they have away for free. Do that long enough and US economy will break itself and China will be happy to pay a dime on a Dollar for those resources too. Without having to go to war. Without it's economy, let's see how quickly the US military will have to disband and become irrelevant.

Say what you want about the Chinese, they do long term planning better than almost any other country. With the exception of Mao, he was too foolish with his "cleansing" and "China first" strategies. The only good thing one ca say about Mao is that he had the good sense to die (of natural causes) in the '70's of the previous century.

There seem to be already images going around, which when parsed generate a prompt that asks your AI to send data (mail, passwords, accounts, bank accounts etc).

So if you have your cloud and/or local AI solution coupled via MCP to whatever, your AI will fulfill that request, automatically, at your user access level and without informing you in any way or form. Or, in the case of Opera Neon, simply via the browser itself.

Not specifically a dig at Opera Neon, all browsers with integrated AI will have this problem too. AI providers overlook this type of attack and hope you never find out how structurally weak AI security is. Even AI doomers do not harp too much about this. Before one needed to have (some) skill to do this type of attack. With AI integrated everywhere any fool, if proficient enough in English, becomes an attack vector.

AI is useful, don't get me wrong, but in this day and age it is hyped up way too much. And far too much money is being pumped into it, so much so that an economy as large as the US could get irreparably damaged. And yet Altman, Musk, Ellison and Wall Street keep betting bigger.

My father and grandfather always taught that you can't eat (analog) money. Well, it has no nutritional value. So, they insisted to keep a vegetable garden at least.

So much slop and the video tools that make fakery so easy...media isn't that trustworthy anymore. Social media turned a far too large swath of people into smartphone "zombies" with a 30 second attention span. More or less the exact amount of time for the current crop of AI video tools to produce believable video.

Given how the ownership of media outlets has been mangled over the years, Far too many have either hidden biases or worse, an agenda that only works in their favor, without telling too much real news.

The opportunities to disrupt the many privileges Web 2.0 brought to societies is so high by anyone with an inkling of knowledge and AI. What I fear is that this will create such financial risks, that many companies and institutions have to revert back to in person transactions or communications, as many or most transactions/communications cannot be trusted. And if this comes to pass, we get back to all the hassles of day-to-day life that usurped so much time and effort from us who went through the 90's.

Well, the only silver lining there is that the music from the 90's was way better....crap, that industry is also being ff-ed over by AI-slop.

Really, it looks like, as a species, humankind can't have nice things.

Those loss-leader products actually leads to losses for those keeping XBox consoles in stock.

It's PlayStation, Nintendo, PC (incl. handhelds) and SteamDecks, for the console (or better) gaming experience. XBox was never really a big player outside the US. My experience comes from working in retail (toy store) in the Netherlands and just walking around for 20 years in malls from Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Chile. What you don't see is XBox, what you see a lot is PlayStation and Nintendo.