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alvvayson

@ alvvayson @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts
0
Comments
360
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • 5 years after Britain left the EU, the full impact of Brexit is still emerging

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  • I always think, capitalism is like fire.

    Left unchecked, it will burn everything down.

    But properly harnessed, it can feed, heat and transport people.

  • Trump threatens BRICS with tariffs if they replace US dollar

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  • The BRICS are already trading without dollars. They might price things in USD, but the actual trades don't use USD.

    But is he really gonna tariff 55% of the global population?

    The world economy will just adjust to operate without the USA. It will be painful and take a few years, but it will also be irreversible.

    To be frank, we don't need a global reserve currency in this digital age. Businesses and consumers can cheaply trade any currency pairs with minimal costs.

    The dollar's status is a leftover from the past.

  • What do you do when people don't care?

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  • My (great)-grandparents were part of the Dutch resistance during WW2. Along with a full 1.5% of the population.

    Most people will not do anything, even if they are literally rounding up people for a genocide.

    On the more positive side, a lot of people will support the resistance in small ways.

    The number of people who actually, whole heartedly collaborated with the Nazi's was quite small.

    Even some of the German soldiers stationed in their village would turn a blind eye. Some of them realized they were on the wrong side and they just did the bare minimum of what they needed to do to not get in trouble and not get killed.

  • An Iraqi man who carried out several Quran burnings in Sweden has been killed

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  • As I understand, he was part of a brigade that killed people in the context of a civil war where his brigade was fighting against ISIS

    Quite an important footnote.

  • Isn't EU's "VAT" a regressive tax? Why do they have that, instead of something like, taxing the rich?

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  • Sure, but those are relatively small potatoes.

    And if a single person does it a lot, then the tax authorities can easily examine their spending and prove that they are spending more than they are officially earning. And then they can apply punitive measures.

  • Trump administration to cancel student visas of pro-Palestinian protesters

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  • He's trying to get foreigners out of the USA and trying to placate his right wing at the same time.

    Honestly, I don't think getting a student visa cancelled is that bad. There are universities in other countries eager to accept foreign students and the tuition they pay.

    Even China has a huge program to attract foreign students. I know people who studied there.

  • 'This is ethnic cleansing': Trump faces backlash over Gaza proposal

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  • Why comment if you don't understand physics. I'm not saying turn the carbon into hydrocarbons, which is wat you are implying.

    Carbon sequestration takes way less energy than the energy released during burning.

  • 'This is ethnic cleansing': Trump faces backlash over Gaza proposal

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  • Because profits are to be made and no country is willing to take this on and foot the bill.

    It's just a "tragedy of the Commons" situation.

    Technologically and financially, it is easily within our capability to solve.

  • JD Vance says Big Tech has "too much power"

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  • You don't understand. This is tech tribal war.

    "Big Tech" is Apple, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta. Companies which were fully allied with the Democrats, and which were king of the tech hill until now.

    Musk, Thiel and Ellison (Tesla, Palantir and Oracle) are allied with Trump. Lets call them "Tech B".

    Vance is doing code speak for: Tech B is gonna break Big Tech up and take top spot.

    And Big Tech knows this, which is why they are scrambling to get into Trumps good graces and trying to get Trump on their side.

    They have more money and influence right now and they are trying to leverage that to keep top spot.

    And Trump is just letting the two teams bid up each other for his favour.

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  • Correct, but the Rabbit Hole goes deeper.

    The company will only reduce margin if they expect to lose volume and if they expect that they can regain sufficient volume by reducing margin to make up for the loss in margin.

    And the reduction in volume will only happen if there are alternatives for consumers, including the alternative to not buy.

    When consumers need the tariffed good regardless of price, the company will not reduce margin.

    (Yeah, it's complex math).

    Long story short, someone else said it better, a tariff works well, with little impact on consumers, when there is a comparable non-tariffed alternative.

    At the other end of that spectrum, i.e. an essential good with no non-tariffed alternative, the tariff cost is fully borne by consumers.

    Finally, in the case of TSMC, their main product right now are the most advanced AI chips for which there is no US alternative. And US Big Tech needs volume that the US cannot produce.

    Trump is basically taxing big tech.

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  • I don't disagree, but I have never understood why Putin attacked in 2022 and not in 2016-2020. The original war in Ukraine started in 2014.

    My best guess is, he thought he could rig an election or corrupt Zelensky and only invaded when that didn't work. And maybe he was confident Trump would win a second term.

    He might have also been doubting the possibility of Trump winning in 2024 and he saw Ukraine getting stronger and integrating with the West day by day.

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  • Thing is, his real goal is to fuck up that alliance.

    Trump has been compromised by the Russians ever since they bailed him out in the 90s. He is actively dismantling American global power, just in a way that is wrapped in a US flag so that the voters don't realize it.

  • 'This is ethnic cleansing': Trump faces backlash over Gaza proposal

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  • It only takes that much time and cost in the West, because we killed nuclear with regulations.

    Look how many reactors China is building.

    I refuse to take anyone seriously that spouts this level of ignorance on technological matters.

  • 'This is ethnic cleansing': Trump faces backlash over Gaza proposal

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  • And due to climate change, they are sadly burning like crazy.

  • 'This is ethnic cleansing': Trump faces backlash over Gaza proposal

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  • The laws of thermodynamics say no such thing. Plants use solar energy to extract carbon from the atmosphere daily.

    We could farm fast growing crops and bury them to sequester the carbon, but using nuclear energy is going to be cheaper and require less land.

    E = mc2

    People really don't understand the massive amount of low carbon energy we have at our disposal with nuclear fission.

    An unwillingness to use it just means we don't want to solve climate change and would rather have our little "oh noes, world is ending" panic.

    China seems to be the only big economy that understands the reality and they will probably solve climate change for the rest of the planet by 2050.

  • Nvidia falls 14% in premarket trading as China's DeepSeek triggers global tech sell-off

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  • Extra funds are only useful if they can provide a competitive advantage.

    Otherwise those investments will not have a positive ROI.

    The case until now was built on the premise that US tech was years ahead and that AI had a strong moat due to high computer requirements for AI.

    We now know that that isn't true.

    If high compute enables a significant improvement in AI, then that old case could become true again. But the prospects of such a reality happening and staying just got a big hit.

    I think we are in for a dot-com type bubble burst, but it will take a few weeks to see if that's gonna happen or not.

  • 'This is ethnic cleansing': Trump faces backlash over Gaza proposal

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  • Climate change has a relatively cheap and easy solution.

    Aresol sprays can buy a few decades of time if things get too hot.

    We already have cheap solar and cheap batteries are becoming a reality. We only need a cheap, non-intermittent energy source to provide baseload energy. Cheap nuclear power is possible and can fill that niche - we had the tech in the past and China has it today.

    For about $1T a fleet of reactors could be built to extract all the excess carbon from the atmosphere in 50 years, working in tandem with cheap solar energy and cheap batteries to power human civilization.

  • Nvidia falls 14% in premarket trading as China's DeepSeek triggers global tech sell-off

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  • They have made it harder, but it's not really hard.

    Just buy any regulated crypto and convert. Cake Wallet makes it easy, but there are many other ways.

    I myself hold Bitcoin and Monero.

  • Nvidia falls 14% in premarket trading as China's DeepSeek triggers global tech sell-off

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  • There could be some trickery on the training side, i.e. maybe they spent way more than $6M to train it.

    But it is clear that they did it without access to the infra that big tech has.

    And on the run side, we can all verify how well it runs and people are also running it locally without internet access. There is no trickery there.

    They are 20x cheaper than OpenAI if you run it on their servers and if you run it yourself, you only need a small investment in relatively affordable servers.