inconceivable

sounds like you're the secret agent if you doubt the scale of their theft.

not just china. the ccp has operatives in every country. they can blackmail anyone at any time.

they have stolen trillions of dollars this way. possibly quadrillions, but we have no way of knowing. the scale of the theft is mind blowing. in the future it may go even higher.

i heard they cost the US taxpayer literally twice as much, possibly 3x as much as a taiwanese graduate student. it's incredible, sometimes they cost as much as a million dollars per year which gets funneled straight to the CCP.

yeah, it's totally useless.... unless of course, you have only one image of the thing you're trying to model. and getting a second image will take millions of dollars or another trip around the earth from orbit.

lmao are you for real?

to keep it simple, think of a 42u rack stuffed to the gills with servers and switches.

that would cost us maybe $10k a month on the margin, and we could resell and manage it for nearly $50k a month. i'm betting amazon could milk it for $200k a month, possibly 2-3x that if it's GPU's.

you don't like chicken that smells like gym socks? i thought i was the only one

> Figuring out the right market segmentation to deliver cheaper prices to those who are more price-conscious, and more functionality to those who can pay.

yeah smart guy, that's what we did for over 10 years. then it became impossible (because it's AMZN and MSFT and GOOG, remember???). then i sold. now i never have to worry about that shit ever again.

i ran a hosting company. a successful one that made money for years. it made me millions of dollars.

i knew it was time to sell when prospective customers literally couldn't believe our prices. they thought we were full of shit, and accused us of being amateurs, fly-by-night scammers. and our prices weren't low - they just weren't insanely inflated like public cloud. we didn't deliberately try to undercut anyone on our quotes. it just started happening one day.

of course we raised our quotes to test the market but then they became too expensive for what we offered. lol. lmao. okay. as you can imagine running infrastructure is something people do not take lightly, so this is an uphill battle all the way. once you have no service or price edge the game is up.

so anyway, long story short, i can take a hint. i'm not nearly as smart as jeff bezos so it was time to gtfo of dodge. luckily with those 0% interest rates we found a buyer and anyone stuck in public cloud hell due to their own incompetence can kiss my ass because we fuckin' told you so.

i agree, the villainizificationeryzationalism is beyond the pale. truty epical in proportionation.

this really should be split among people who have kids vs. not.

once people have kids the budget goes up for a lot of different reasons.

i stopped using ALL personal hygiene products except for generic unscented soap over a decade ago. for laundry i use unscented arm and hammer detergent. i used to stink after workouts or stressful workdays but now i basically do not smell at all, ever. confirmed by multiple partners after sexytimes over the years.

as i entered my late 20s i got weird scalp issues and that prompted me to look into it - turns out NOT using the products is what helped.

so the guy with the super duper chinese sounding name who works for the company literally just told the investigators they were doing a bunch of illegal super-villain shit there like genetically modifying animals to spread covid? like, he just said "yeah, we're doing that." ... what?

this is all according to some podunk newspaper called the san joaquin valley sun, of course.

sorry, i don't believe this for a microsecond.

no. jacob shapiro of cognitive investments.

pretty much everyone else with a public platform in geopolitical analysis has a low opinion of zeihan. this includes shapiro, papic, and other stratfor alumni who i pay attention to.

zeihan's analysis is performative and is designed to make him money, not provide value to anyone in the real world. wow, america's geography makes it invincible and china will collapse any day now because they suck at innovating. that's super insightful and original. i definitely haven't been hearing that repeated ad nauseum for literally 40 years.

noah is a prototypical 90's-era weeb who worships japan and absolutely despises china and chinese people in general.

i'm surprised in 2023 people aren't yet tired of this schtick. it's getting old.

fyi, this can happen in a successful startup/business also. this happened to me when i was stressed out of my mind and stuck doing work i hate for customers i didn't want after 10 years of running a biz.

it took a breakup, a sale of the business, and nearly 2 years of doing nothing until i recovered.

fwiw, the biggest takeaways the whole thing taught me are 1. be careful of what you wish for and 2. both attractive women and customers want outcomes, they don't give a shit about your problems and 3. never forego vacations/holidays for work.

as for me, well - you know how the saying goes - it's always darkest before the dawn, and life is good now. for the time being. but i know that if i wake up one day and i'm feeling like a fucking pack mule for people who don't appreciate me, it's time for a massive rapid change, without the period of suffering this time.

yes - the US tells them who to fear and who to hate, and why.

the entire anglosphere follows the beat of their drummer. it's obvious if you ever travel outside of the 5 eyes countries + NATO, which i'm guessing like 90% of english speakers don't, and never will.

mexican isn't an ethnicity. it's a nationality. there are native american mexicans and the whitest of white european mexicans as well as "asiatic" (lmao lol) mexicans.

greyhound literally is for poor people.

that's about the equivalent of calling someone 'asiatic', a term used for animal species lmao. of course you probably don't give a shit, and neither do we really care about calling you names either.

lmao yeah dude they replace it every year.

all of that, and people lie on these kinds of surveys. also, people lie to themselves constantly about relationship status. 'we are currently fucking' is not objectively definitive and is open to personal interpretation.

and don't forget conditioning/momentum - "sorry i have a boyfriend" is the automatic reflexive response of a 20-something female, for a huge variety of contexts, regardless of whether it's true or not.

it's like 10 different statements rolled into one.

either way, i suspect that yes, a lot of young women are all in 'relationships' with the same subset of guys in the 25-45 age range who are cleaning up the scene and loving life. there's never been a better time to be an attractive male.

australians deeply hate/fear china at a visceral level, which is pretty much the only thing that matters in this relationship.

they'll gladly sacrifice their own economic growth and autonomy to bolster the US hegemony. this is patently obvious to anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together. it's less than 20 million white people sitting on a continent the size of the US. they need protection at any cost, no questions asked. this isn't rocket science.

DC wears the commonwealth crown these days, london is a literal sideshow/museum/slush fund and canberra is basically just a military/listening outpost with a mining station attached.

why don't you save us all a bit of time and just go ahead and tell us exactly which rights we're allowed to have in order to protect the children in your perfect kingdom?

like, will you allow me to drive a car, or eat beef, or own a kitchen knife?

yeah, so? there are plenty of fat adapted athletes. and 'active' people don't come anywhere close to the needs of a real athlete.

everyone was really nice to me in paris.

your body doesn't need any carbs. carbs are cheap and easy and tasty and plentiful but not required at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis

also, the US government says you should eat a shitload of it, so you can probably just assume it's terrible for you.

lol dude you have sleep apnea. you're suffocating.

> A Mitsbishi subsidiary controls 40% of the worlds blue fin tuna

lmao if this were a chinese company you can be sure tuna would be banned overnight.

depends on the kid. you may get lucky and have a kid that loves to listen to rules and conform to parental expectations.

or your kid might turn out like me. you don't think there are ways a clever 11, 12, 13 year old can get a phone, and hide it from you?