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CountSessineon Is this how Russia ends?

There's a good reason so many nations that were formerly dominated by Russia are now exceeding them in GDP per capita.

“Isn’t ruled by Vladimir Putin” is highly predictive of GDP, but “has a warm-water port” is far more predictive.

Who is doing well? Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Georgia, Azerbaijan.

Who isn’t doing well? Kazakhstan, Kirghizistan, Tajikistan…

There are other variables. “Who has oil”, for example. But “who has unencumbered access to world trade through the sea” is the best.

CountSessineon Is this how Russia ends?

Czeckia is in the EU customs union and therefore for the purposes of land-locked or not land-locked, Czeckia has ports at its disposal. In fact Czeckia can use Gdańsk without penalty.

The reason landlocked countries have lower GDP is that they have to negotiate trade agreements at a disadvantage with small numbers of neighbours rather than just shipping goods to the whole world over the seas.

CountSessineon Is this how Russia ends?

All of these countries save Switzerland are within the EU customs union. Being land-locked is a disadvantage precisely because you have a limited number of countries to negotiate trade with and not much leverage. Countries with a port can have trade relationships with the entire world.

Switzerland has always been able to/had to find a niche like banking or secrecy or regulatory arbitrage to prosper. But in theory they suffer from the same problem - limited trading partners and limited leverage.

CountSessineon Is this how Russia ends?

Maybe…

Something to keep in mind is that land-locked countries experience slower economic growth and have lower GDPs than countries with access to ports. Russia is mostly restricted to their Black Sea ports but they still have something. Break Russia up and you’ll be condemning a lot of people to a lower standard of living long-term.

CountSessineon Block a tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it

Just in time for the culture wars!

CountSessineon Crypto is an unproductive bubble

You're giving the earnings back to investors because you don't have anything to invest them in yourself. Just like you're supposed to.

It's just that you're just doing it through a buyback rather than a dividend because dividends in the US are taxed like plain-old income and buybacks turn into capital gains and are taxed less.

CountSessineon China's state media buys Meta ads pushing Russia's line on war

No one is suggesting that they'll sign up for a proxy war out-of-the-blue. But the Russians are clearly surprised by the hostile resistance they've met from ordinary Ukrainians. I think they really thought that they would be welcomed or at least met with indifference.

Every time I've heard a militant Chinese unification advocate talk about Taiwanese unification, they scoff at the idea that the Taiwanese would actually resist a PLA invasion. Now that possibility can't be ignored.

"You may not be interested in war, but war is very interested in you."

CountSessineon The new silent majority: People who don't tweet

Yeah - you're probably right

CountSessineon The new silent majority: People who don't tweet

This was one of the ideas behind Google+ - "circles". You could put other people in different broadcast "circles" and then you wouldn't end up announcing your weird fetish preferences or drug use to your grandma or your coworkers - at least not intentionally.

CountSessineon New York Times tech workers vote to certify union

Of course they can - unless you live in a jurisdiction with a so-called “right to work” statute.

If you weren’t forced to join then, in theory, management could subvert and then break the union by hiring lots of new employees who are compensated to “opt-out”.

CountSessineon Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

The CCP won't democratize. It was heading in that direction under Hu, now under Xi Jinping things are consolidating back towards a centralist power.

I agree completely. But if you're in the CCP, and a Chinese patriot, you understand that that makes peaceful Taiwanese reunification even less likely. Also, as long as Taiwan is defacto-independent, there's a terrible risk that they will declare themselves officially-independent. That would be a humiliating loss of face for the CCP and at the very least would probably precipitate a power struggle within the party.

There is deep history between Taiwan and China, and it is this history that is the main reason why China eyes Taiwan. Think of it like if California rebelled and became a separate country from the US 50 years ago. How would the rest of the US think about California?

Again, I completely agree.

CountSessineon Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

I doubt they care about TSMC.

The CCP understands (or at least was predicting back with Jiang and Hu) that eventually China will democratize. Taiwan is a democracy right now. Democratic countries almost never re-unite into a single country. I can only name one instance of this happening in the last 70 years, and in some ways East Germany wasn't really a democracy yet.

The CCP knows that Taiwanese reunification will never really happen peacefully. Leaders will talk about it, they'll negotiate a bit, but then it won't happen because the status-quo is always more attractive. They know that their only chance at national reunification is now or in the next 10 years or so.

It's now or never. It has to happen by force or it will never happen. If China swallows Taiwan and then democratizes, that can be managed - a restive province can be placated and bought-off. But if China democratizes before reunification, then Taiwan is separate forever.

CountSessineon Ukraine is a major producer of neon gas, critical for lasers used in chipmaking

I think they'll be watching what happens in Ukraine very carefully. Then they'll be calibrating their predictions about what would happen if they invaded Taiwan with Russia's experience in Ukraine.

CountSessineon SpaceX’s monstrous, dirt-cheap Starship may transform space travel

Technical know how, mostly. But in expected ways. Machining and engineering skills as they relate to manufacturing are different now.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ovD0aLdRUs0

CountSessineon Investors bought a record share of U.S. homes in 2021

Japan has a declining population. Residential real estate inevitably declines with this demographic trajectory.

The Kansai region has an increasing population and real estate prices are still in decline or stable.

Also Japan did not have a lot of nimby mentality blocking new housing, to my knowledge

Yes, they did - prior to 2001 when the national government took zoning authority away from municipalities.

CountSessineon AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

I think integration was always going to be hard and most people who understood the problem knew that it was going to be hard/impossible but they went ahead with it anyways.

At the time they were talking about integrated compute units between CPU and GPU, mapping GPU register space into CPU address space, linking/unlinking CPU and GPU pipelines, etc etc. And the CPU and GPU teams would be working on this while also having to produce top-shelf stand-alone CPUs and GPUs to fight on 2 separate fronts against entrenched and capable competitors. It didn't really seem possible or even desirable at the time.

I also don't understand why having a GPU would improve their chances with console vendors. Those vendors could have still selected AMD CPUs but cut separate deals for the GPU with other companies. This is a business AMD is already and was already in. They do this in all sorts of markets like network switches.

CountSessineon AMD Receives Approval for Acquisition of Xilinx

Why?

Has Intel done anything with Altera? I’m curious.

AMD’s acquisition of ATI is generally viewed as a strategic error. Does this make more sense?

CountSessineon You cannot police misinformation in a fair, reproducible, and representative way

what do you do about sealioning

Interesting - in the talk.origins days this was called the "Gish Gallop".

In practice, everyone who debates you is sealioning you because they don't see what is so clearly obvious to you. And they just never stop being wrong! And if they weren't wrong, wouldn't they be able to change your mind? Ergo, they're wrong!

CountSessineon How UTF-8 Works

Basically, you don't want to use UTF-8 to encode UTF-16 surrogate code points

The awful truth is that there is such a beast. UTF-8 wrapper with UTF-16 surrogate pairs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CESU-8

CountSessineon Ottawa has lost control of itself

I think it's the Nazi flags. Symbols of treason and rebellion, expressions of violent intent towards fellow citizens. It stopped being fellow citizens with disagreeable and even laughable views expressing their right to freely assemble and express themselves then and there.

Oh goodness.

I don't support the protests or their aims, but remember that there were a hell of a lot of protesters in CHOP and BLM in general carrying and displaying Marxist and Soviet iconongraphy. Making the whole BLM movement answer for the 80 million dead Chinese peasants and Kulaks would be pretty stupid. Do you really expect BLM to be policing their ranks like that? If you cut them a break for a few ignorant fools in their protests, why is this any different?

Don't be crazy. This whole situation is bad enough what with the break-down in law and order without hysterically shouting about Nazism.

CountSessineon Why are semi trucks in the US and Europe so different? (2018)

I've often wondered about this. Here in North America we only get the Mercedes models that need their disc rotors replaced every 30k, and we see nothing of the indestructible and serviceable models that seem to wind up in places without posh MB dealerships.

I've always thought that this was because NA has air pollution laws that are strictly and honestly enforced and that that would make diesel cars difficult to offer.

CountSessineon Why are semi trucks in the US and Europe so different? (2018)

It has been proven that a cab-forward design is safer for avoiding accidents directly in front of the vehicles, something that is more focused on in the EU.

Ironic, because back in the 70's when there were more CoE designs driving around in the US, it was generally known through crash tests that CoE cab trucks were a lot less safe than conventional cab trucks in front-end collisions because of the driver's distance to the collision.

If CoE trucks have gotten safer in front-end collisions, it's because a lot of engineering work has been done to mitigate this old problem.

CountSessineon Why are semi trucks in the US and Europe so different? (2018)

You really think that owner operators repair their own trucks? That doesn't make any economic sense. This is not a hobby, they need to drive to make money not to play truck repairman.

I've known several owner-operators, friends of family mostly, and yes, they routinely strip and repair their own kit. It's a lot cheaper and very often faster than taking it into a shop.

I'm always astonished how US Americans try to justify poor engineering with...

O_o

CountSessineon Why are semi trucks in the US and Europe so different? (2018)

Exactly. The irony of Mercedes-Benz engineers marveling at how unsophisticated a simply-engineered vehicle is brought a smile to my face. Most owner-operator truck drivers want to be able to fix and maintain their trucks on their own, not bring the truck into the dealer every 3 months like some temperamental S-class.

Although I guess Mercedes was still pretty reliable back in the 80's.

CountSessineon Apple removes Python 2.7 in macOS 12.3 beta

MacOS includes cpython 2.7 and 3.x by default. The OP is wondering about what `/usr/bin/python` will point to now or whether it will even exist.

CountSessineon In Argentina, inflation is a way of life

So clearly some people didn't hate them? In fact, maybe the majority?

CountSessineon In Argentina, inflation is a way of life

It sounds like what Argentina needs is Paul Volcker, not Nelson Mandela. What would Nelson Mandela do?

CountSessineon In Argentina, inflation is a way of life

...and yet you voted for those politicians?

CountSessineon Don't let computers generate your advertising or things like this will happen

lgtm

CountSessineon In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)

Three bytes are enough to fit nearly any of the chars in use in any language, including Chinese and Japanese

With only 3 bytes you'll completely miss plane 2, the "Supplementary Ideographic Plane" which includes tons of Chinese-Japanese-Korean Han characters.

I wish people would stop saying the supplementary characters are just for "emoji". Asian unification was very controversial and ultimately unsuccessful. Plane 1 and Plane 2 are important, especially if you're going to sell software or products in China or Japan where they are mandated.