DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]

A gaggle of particle physicists standing in a circle chanting “RING! WORLD! RING! WORLD!”

You won’t be able to drive them on the road unless the DoT has done safety testing on that specific model of car. You can own one, you’re just not going to be able to put plates on it or get it insured.

Presumably there are enough sane Ukrainian officials left to not want to wake up to nuclear hellfire.

While I wouldn’t put it past Google/YouTube to do something as shitty as this, I think people are far too quick to assume foul play over the much more likely possibility that the world’s largest video platform occasionally shits itself.

The US once again going through a dozen Suez Canal crises all at once, each one somehow more cartoonishly stupid than the last.

At this point I feel like if you want to radicalize someone just point them to a picture of that barely-welded-together mess and tell them their tax money went towards that to the tune of $320 million.

Never would’ve happened. Western capital saw the vast natural wealth of the Soviet bloc the way a starving wolf sees a steak, and were never going to allow the new Russian bourgeoisie to join the West as equals. When it became clear that Russia wasn’t going to sell itself out to foreign capital, the West responded by violating every agreement they’d made with Yeltsin to bring about the end of the USSR and isolating them.

The goat pastures call to us all.

Just comical amounts of racism. I guess it’s only fitting that the US chase the braindrain it relies on to drive any productive sectors it hasn’t outsourced back to their home countries as it spirals into imperial decline.

I nearly had a heart attack until I read the word “ARM” at the end.

It seems like ARM Arch is doomed for whatever reason.

Space is an ocean. That’s why there’s space whales.

My country, which has killed more people than any other geopolitical entity in human history and is ruled by a literal monarchy, is clearly free and egalitarian, unlike that horrific autocratic nightmare of…

checks notes

…a tiny Central American nation that’s been routinely bombed and exploited for its entire existence.

I’m begging liberals to remember the one cool thing they ever did, which was chopping off their monarchs’ heads, and commit to that. Just that. Come on now, this is an argument that’s been solved for like 200 years now: monarchs and aristocrats are dogshit and deserve to be forcibly removed from their positions of wealth and authority.

and packaging this into a system that meets the scale and reliability requirements to make it commercially viable hasn’t been reproduced to date

Your overall point about EUV being difficult isn’t wrong, but this line is really where the typical liberal forecasting of China’s capabilities fall apart: they don’t give a shit about it being commercially viable, they give a shit about having the industrial capacity.

The reason why EUV is more or less a cartel monopoly in the West is that it’s a cobbled together collection of scientific principles that work well enough that the first few companies that figured it out could make insane profits off of it, and then proceeded to patent the shit out of it to prevent anyone else from doing so. The engineering behind EUV is… not great from a reliability standpoint, most notably the fact that EUV has an average downtime of something like 10% (meaning your fabs are offline 10% of the year for maintenance), in large part because you’re shooting little droplets of liquid metals with a high intensity laser which tends to splatter and require cleanup. There are potential alternatives to this process for creating the kind of UV light you need for lithography, such as particle accelerators, that are theoretically superior but the R&D into those alternatives costs tens of billions of dollars with no guarantees that any of it will ever become profitable, so Western capital doesn’t bother trying.

China doesn’t have that profit restriction. It needs the ability to produce bleeding edge chips to remove its reliance on an increasingly hostile West, and it has not only the engineering and scientific power to brute force that kind of R&D but the ability to devote a sizeable portion of its national resources to doing so. It doesn’t matter if its profitable, it matters if they’re able to decouple a critical industry from the West and ignore sanctions accordingly, and that has infinitely more value than a shareholder dividend, so they will put the resources into doing so and, inevitably, they will figure it out. And from what we’ve seen over the past 2 years since the trade wars have started, they’re not only succeeding but doing so ahead of expectations, in large part because increasing tensions have made life a living hell for Chinese scientists and engineers abroad working in these industries due to racism and suspicions of spying which push them to emigrate back to China and lend their expertise there instead.

In 20 years, chips made in mainland China will be competitive or even superior to their Western counterparts unless the West undoes 50 years of neoliberal rot overnight and replicates what the CPC is doing for silicon manufacturing or the CPC collapses and China experiences the same shock doctrine that the former Soviet states did in the 90s, and neither of those outcomes look likely right now.

Amazon is supposedly working on it, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up of it being any good.

Time doesn’t slow down when you approach the speed of light

Correct, but only from your perspective. To other people you’ve slowed down, but from where you’re sitting (or careening through the cosmos at the universal speed limit) everything happens just as fast as it normally does.

the theory we’re using to describe much of the universe is based on a bad premise, that the speed of light is constant.

Quasi-correct. “The speed of light” as we think of it in physics is actually the speed of information, which dictates how quickly changes can propagate outwards (or put another way: how quickly you can know about something happening elsewhere). We refer to it as the speed of light because photons move at that speed in a vacuum due to having no mass and thus moving at the fastest possible speed, but things like gravitational waves also propagate at that same speed and have nothing to do with EM radiation. However, the speed of information doesn’t change; it’s a hard natural law with no known exceptions.

Physics in general is cheating for this thread though, because the answer to what makes stuff happen as we understand it is a giant metaphorical mass of “I 'unno.” The Standard Model, relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, etc all have giant gaping holes in them that other models can often fill, but cannot be properly combined in any way that we’ve tried so far. They’re still correct enough to base your entire life around without any worries, but there’s always that last 0.01% that amounts to the margins of old maps reading “Here There Be Dragons”.

There’s a top surgery joke in here somewhere, I can feel it.

Sure there is. An enormous chunk of housing sits unused and empty because real estate speculators want to rent them out at exorbitant prices rather than use it for it’s intended purpose of having a roof over people’s heads.

Pass nationwide legislation that restricts owning housing for commercial purposes beyond a certain threshold, and put rent controls in place pegged to 20% of the median income per town/city. You’d eliminate 95% of homelessness before the ink was dry, massively increase homeownership rates, and be the most popular politician of an era.

It’s not even an ebil communist plot, and it’d still be more effective than giving even more money to private developers on a pinky promise they’ll build something people can afford, just trust them this time.

Steve Jobs quite openly hated the idea of anyone gaming on a Mac because he felt like it made their products seem more childish or something. It seems like either nobody at Apple has managed to dig that particular brainworm out yet or have just decided that printing iPhone money makes all other concerns irrelevant.

You have to sell a new phone every 12-18 months, because otherwise the shareholders eat you alive for not chasing infinite profits. You have to differentiate your new phone from your last phone, even if there are no meaningful changes to be made and the last phone was good enough for everything anyone would ever use it for (as was the one before it, and the one before that, and etc etc). You have to push for people to buy the new phone, because otherwise you don’t make money.

So you tell the engineers to bump up the clock speeds on the processor 5-10% so you can market it as being faster. You market the phone as being revolutionary for using the USB connector that was forced on you by regulators because your proprietary one was filling landfills with e-waste and pretend like it was your brilliant idea all along. You make sure to limit that USB connector to speeds that were outdated 10 years ago purely so you have a built-in ‘upgrade’ for your next phone where you fix the thing that shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with.

And then you realize your phone overheats because you overclocked the processor, all to squeeze extra performance out of a chip that 99.9999999999% of users will never notice or need. You’ve made the user experience of your phone worse purely so you could pursue an untenable goal of endless profit, a pattern you will repeat every 12-18 months for the rest of eternity or until the climate wars claim your life.

Only the most sane and functional economic system.

The answer is that the eagles are theologically angels in LotR and both sapient and very susceptible to the Ring, and having a flying Sauron-replacement is not an improvement.