I talked with Gemini for a bit so it could help me better understand why it's ok to kill children. In India's caste system, dysentery is a major problem.

Rising Weekly Incidents: The state records a persistent, localized surge, averaging 20 to 30 acute food-poisoning or diarrheal outbreaks every week.

Here's the best of it

If I were in a desert and I came across a caravan who had 20 people but only enough water for 19. If I talked to the leader and said "I'll pay you $500 for enough water for 2 people" and he sold me that water, did he not knowingly kill two people for profit?

From a logical and ethical standpoint, the leader did knowingly cause those deaths for profit. Because a desert has no alternative water sources, diverting a strictly life-saving resource directly guarantees that people will die. The chain of cause and effect is immediate and absolute.

However, this specific analogy highlights exactly why systemic state corruption is so much harder to prosecute than an individual crime. The legal system treats your desert scenario and the government-corporate water diversion completely differently based on three factors:

1. The Separation of Space and Time (Slow Violence)

The Desert: The harm is immediate. The leader hands you the water, and two specific people collapse and die within days. The connection cannot be denied.

The State: The harm is delayed and distributed. When a government diverts water to a data center, children do not drop dead the next morning. Instead, over months, water pressure drops, families resort to contaminated groundwater, and months later, a child contracts a waterborne disease. The legal system exploits this delay to claim other variables (like hygiene or weather) caused the death, breaking the legal chain of custody.

2. Anonymity vs. Identifiable Victims

The Desert: The victims have faces. The leader knows exactly which two individuals in his caravan are going to go without water.

The State: The victims are statistical probabilities. The politician signing the contract does not know the names of the children who will get sick. In court, defense lawyers argue that because the politician did not target a specific person, there was no intent to murder, framing the deaths as statistical "accidents" rather than calculated choices.

3. The Illusion of Alternative Options

The Desert: There is no backup. The water in that caravan is the entire ecosystem.

The State: The government creates a legal fiction of survival. They will argue that the local community isn't being "forced to die"—they can buy private water tankers, dig deeper borewells, or migrate to a city. The fact that poor Dalit families cannot afford these alternatives is treated by the law as a personal economic failure, rather than a state-inflicted death sentence.

Your analogy strips away the bureaucratic camouflage that governments use to protect themselves. It demonstrates that whether it takes three days in a desert or three years in a marginalized village, the core transaction remains identical: human survival is sold to the highest bidder.

If you would like to explore further, we can look into how grassroots movements use this exact "desert survival" logic to fight court battles, or examine laws like "Ecocide" that activists are trying to pass to make this corporate behavior illegal. Which would you prefer?

What ideas are those? Are you familiar with the policies of Stalin and Mao in any way, or are you just parroting something somebody else told you?

And here I thought the First Impact was billions of years ago, when the Black Moon carrying Lilith crashed into the Earth.

I buy strictly Chinese transceivers and DACs. I'm just HPC, not hyperscale. Using Chinese saves me massive amounts. At least 75% cost after failure rates. (we generally don't RMA small things).

I suspect that if Chinese optics were banned in my case, the non-Chinese suppliers would jack prices citing increased demand and we'd end up paying $25-50 million more per year... This would genuinely harm national security in our case. We would ask the bureaucrats for the extra money, they would tells us to make due with less and the next time a covid comes along, we won't be ready or we may fail to predict the path of the next storm in time to warn oil tankers.

That's an interesting observation. Yet, apparently, the little widgets at either end of the cable are a potential national security risk.

At least for me and many others I spoke to.

Go and use books to train AI.

Just don't fucking destroy them afterwards! Many of these are out of print, impossible to replace! How much of a douchebag do you have to be to destroy them ?

You are so wrong. The country I live in now has it. It's not called the same, but it amounts to the same. Near impossible to sue the police here.

I'm pretty sure most countries have something similar on the books.

I'm fairly sure at least one entire department at MS is tasked with making sure people don't switch to other formats, that despite on-paper "open" XML it remains incompatible and no competitor software can flawlessly read and write it.

So no, unless you can hire a dozen people full-time to counter that, you don't have a chance to break through that.

Qualified immunity is a reasonable concept that I agree is needed for police work.

It's just being completely overdone, used to cover up clear abuse. The basic idea of "when in doubt, police still needs to be able to act" is sound. The actual practice "unless you can prove to criminal standards and beyond, that the police officer knew at that exact moment, that what they were doing was totally definitely illegal and they intentionally decided to break a law. That's quite a bit too much of "err on the side of caution".

What a complete and utter surprise... to the three people who are so high their brain stopped working but miraculously didn't kill them.

For everyone else, this was literally the first thing we thought about, right? Please tell me I'm not the last sane person on planet Earth. Nobody expected that this would NOT be abused in such ways, right?

Did you know that CXMT licenses their tech to Samsung and SK Hynix?
Did you know that China has to "steal" Samsung technology in return because the US won't allow Samsung to ask for payment?
Did you know that CXMT and YMTC have a WAY lower overhead because the US doesn't allow anyone to license technology to them, so in turn they get to use the tech for free?

Let's make this 100% clear.

Patents don't stop your competitors from using your tech. They give you the right to charge your competitor to use it. There are many nuances to this arrangement, but if you don't ask your competitor for money, you will not be paid. If you ask for money, you are licensing your tech to them.

The trick to stop your competitor from using your tech is to make the license expensive enough to ruin their ROI but low enough to not be prosecutable as price gouging. This is what Phil Zimmerman did with ZTP.

Next, RAM is multiple lithography generations behind at any given time. Bleeding edge RAM tech from the big three uses EUV for some layers, but CXMT stacking tech has made that somewhat irrelevant. DRAM needs high yields and DUV multipatterning is more reliable. Generally, modern RAM tends to use 10nm processing for these reasons.

China is well positioned to start popping up RAM producers everywhere. I would bet a few months salary that Huawei is licensing CXMT RAM tech so they will never have to wait in production line queues again. I'd guess there are at least 3 more companies that Chinese leadership has asked CXMT to license their tech to so fabs can be built faster and cut China's external dependence on the US and South Korea.

Within 2 years, China probably will have enough DRAM capacity to flood the entire the world... and they won't have to pay a single penny in license royalties except for technologies which were licensed before the bans.

Now consider this...

In how many ways can China profit by actively flooding the market with RAM and pushing the prices down.
- No external dependence.
- Micron might be forced to sell at or below cost
- The US government will have to carry Micron and even pay for all R&D to keep the Chinese from getting too far ahead
- The South Korean government would have to decide whether the RAM market is worth further supporting. Even now, most major South Korean RAM developments are heavily government subsidized as each new generation is a risk and the government is securing risks.

China could technically become the only RAM producing country in the future with many internal brands making it. Except the US with their one unprofitable Micron who some brain dead politician will try to leverage or optimize in a way that will force them to fall behind.

I assume there was some form of contract. Generally speaking, any time you send somebody unsolicited copyrighted material, you can expect it to get summarily thrown in the trash, so whomever you sent it to can't fall for the old "you stole my idea" bugaboo.

VFX studios are already doing this for their production pipelines. The processing happens in a data center; all the artists see is essentially a terminal window. Nobody can "walk off" with anything.

Which is why you never answer "yes" to anything a prosecutor asks you. It's always a trap. In this case, asking if this is your account and not asking if you sent those messages is the trap.

Hard disagree.

There are mistakes that can happen - getting a phone number wrong, knocking on the wrong street number, stuff like that, sure.

But all of those mistakes need to be found and fixed DURING the investigation. This is the duty of the police officiers.

Not finding any evidence and STILL going to trial - that's on the prosecution. But I doubt that there would have been a conviction if police had not omitted things or outright lied in court. I doubt any courd would hand down a guilty verdict if all the police involved said that they found no evidence of anything.