Intel has tried to go into foundry business two times already I think. So far they have been far to secretive about their tech stack, making them unworkable for customers. I'm not too sure about their ability to change this time either.

However their ability to go into foundry business is going to be existential sooner or later. Without the volume, income, and experience the foundry brings there will be a hard limit to their ability to keep up with the tech race.

Where's my mod points when I need them:)

If we need scientists to figure out social media is addictive, all the while we know very well that copious amounts of time, brains, and money is invested into making it addictive, all the while billions of people roam around the world unable to function 15min without their smartphone... there really is no hope for us.

I was referring to the likes of the life of the Amazon warehouse or delivery worker.

The future was promised to be that robots do the manual labor, and humans make art and sing merry songs.

The reality seems to be set that human treated as robots do the manual labor, and AI does the art and songs part.

TFA didn't get the memo it seems.

I never really understood rebranding at all. Take what your customers know about your brand, and throw it in the trash. I mean I understand it if your brand is trash, but if it's actually successful and selling, maybe not fuck with it?

Yo dawg, I heard you like pro, so we put pro on your pro so you can pro while you pro?

The question of legitimacy, as seen by the US, concerning the presidency of Venezuela, is simple enough. It's whether the current government at odds with US or not.

Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves in the world, and basically all politics in the country boils down to the power struggle of a US connected elite who wants to control the oil, mostly in favour of US Big Oil, and a populist leftist faction who wants to control the oil, mostly in favour of the general populace. The trouble has since forever been two-fold - when the US backed elite is out of power, the US is always working with them to cause trouble for the leftist government. And when the US backed elite is in power, it's blatant disregard for the needs of the country and general populace works towards it's own yet another downfall. It doesn't help that so far any leftist government has been unable to do much but buy public welfare with oil money, without building and actual strong economy for the country. This brings about things like great improvement in pretty much every metric of public welfare during the Chávez years, which coicided with good oil prices, yet a lot of it was undone when oil prices crashed.

This doesn't mean people necessarily love Maduro or Chávez or the lot, although many do, too. It's just that exactly like in every other country where the US takes to meddle for it's own interest, the US is univerally hated and people will opt for literally anyone who is not associated with them. Maybe in a similar vein like when you really hate Hillary or Biden, Trump starts to look pretty good.

Now as to the linked Blinken statement... One should by now know the difference of the actions of politics, and the rhetoric used to sell these actions. First the ends are settled on, and then unrelated talking points are constructed to reach the means needed obtain the ends. Any public statement by the government should thus be seen for what it is, bullshit not worth the breath used to utter it.

What is this, news for nerds?

That's because on the base level, capitalism is at odds with the interests of the public. Capital has no values other than capital, all it cares about is to make more, and thus has no qualms about doing so at the expense of others. Since the government is there, at least in theory, to protect and benefit the people, capitalism seeks to weaken and capture the government. Left unchecked, it will succeed, because it has all the money in the world to throw at the problem.

This was well understood in the US back in the postwar era, when capital was taxed off most of it's profits, so that it could not gain too much power, and the government used the money to do what was actually needed, but capital had no interest in doing. But then Reagan ushered in the age of neoliberalism, which is an ideology that says the answer to every societal problem is more capitalism. Both parties adopted the ideology, and capital started gaining ground rapidly. By now it has all but won it's war against government in the US, and the government is almsot completely commited to working for capital against the people.

In China so far, the government understands that it's job is to keep capital in check, not only for the good of the people, nor for the good of the government, but in the long run, for the good of capital itself, too. Because once capital wins over government, it destroys the country, and itself, too, as the US is in the process of finding out right now. China works hard to learn from the mistakes of others. So far, so good.

Are we still talking India, or is this about the West? Because have you seen what goes on in the West, where the economy is measured by how the stocks are doing, while peoples lives are getting shittier by the day, and a third of the stock market is an AI bubble that is going to bring everything down once it pops. Talk about IQ...

In any case, there is not scope for rationality on the stock market anywhere. It's a glorified casino, where the house always wins, and the rare success is about predicting where the herd will go.

"Letting them get near" is not exactly putting it in correct terms. Yes such a talking point was part of the sales pitch, but one should by now know the difference between the words and actions in politics.

Western elites sent all their jobs and factories to China, and the Chinese were smart enough to accept it on the condition of technology transfer.

The West itself taught China everything it knows about manufacturing. Everything was delivered to them on a silver platter. There is no other way to put it but treason on a civilizational scale, but it made some of our elites insanely rich, so they made it happen. The result is we already live in a Chinese world, but it will be years before the dust settles and the West wakes up to look around, and the people at fault will be long dead by then.

Coming back to the OP, yes there still was an actual letting them get near strategy available, even after all the outsourcing had happened. The West still had tech lead in three key areas - semiconductors, aerospace, and biotech. All the West had to do was to keep the lead and not fuck it up. The Chinese were happy to buy this stuff from us. Because in the end, they also want to sell to us, and trade needs to be mostly balanced out, otherwise someone is giving away their stuff for free. Money you earn but never spend is not worth the paper it's printed on.

But then the West went and fucked it up. The US, having designated China their enemy number one, and starting all sorts of trade wars, proved to them beyond any doubt, already by Trump's last term, that they would have to be self-sufficient in everything. Now Trump is flailing around like a windmill, but the Chinese are prepared, and Trump has no leverage anymore. China is about to close the gap.

But once the gap has closed - what will the West have left to sell to China? To anyone? Because anything the West can make, the Chinese are about to make better and cheaper. But if you have nothing to sell, you have no money to buy anything, either. The West will end up poor, backwards, and isolated. Like it used to be.

Without taking the disability question into account:

Serifs in print, as they help differentiate the letters.

Sans-serifs on screens, because they often make the letters fuzzy. Unless you have a resolution high enough that rendering their detail is not sub-pixel anymore.

The battlefield between two crumbling post-soviet republics has told us that drones and piecemeal mashups have made big materiel almost obsolete. This is about as major a development as can possibly be. War is never going to be the same again.

Because the number of the drones is not important. The survivability of the target, and cost of the drones versus the cost of the target is.

The Houthis beat the US Navy in the Red Sea. The poorest country in the world went against the richest country in the world, and came out on top. And all of the US military aid to Ukraine has been at best unable to win the war.

This is what asymmetric warfare is. One would hope the US has learned it's lesson in the forever wars, but alas. One would hope that the US had learned it's lesson in the Millennium Challenge war games, but alas.

A fpv drone is about $100, an Abrams tank about $10M. Cruise missiles cost in the $1M range, a US aircraft carrier costs about $10B. With that kind of math you can literally use thousands ofb small ones to kill a big one and still come out on top with lots to spare. Except, of course, you don't need thousands. A few drones or a few dozens of cruise missiles is all you need. And in the case of the Houthis, you don't even need to sink a target to achieve your aim.

China was happy to import all sorts of things, but the US with it's sanctions blunders convinced them that they need to be self-sufficient in everything.