lgleason

Everyone is under the illusion that the US is still a democracy. It is not. It is a plutocracy. The rich control everything and the rest are modern day serfs.

Interesting that the total removal flights have not really gone up by much compared with the rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration.

If this happened in the US or Europe it would be an interesting story. In South Africa, this is just par for the course and the quality of the work may not have been any better had it been written by the current people staffing home affairs.

this ^^^^ not to mention modern fertilizers

Got to love that golden age.

So much for that golden age.

So the only golden age is the gaudy gold he added to the white house and the profits for all of his oligarch friends/defense contractors etc. while everybody else suffers.

Let them eat cake.

For that base display, it is essentially the same as the previous monitor with the addition of Thunderbolt 5.

The the smaller xdr has better brightness and thunderbolt 5, so it depends on what you are looking for.

If you create an economic incentive to go into math an science you will have no trouble attracting good people. But, for years, it has been a race to the bottom where the US over-produced researchers, scientists etc.. But then to put salt in the wound it also imported more of them to drive the wages down further. As more people have flooded in to STEM at bargain basement prices, the quality of the research has also gone down.

All of this was by design so that big corporate interests could get cheap labor and increase profits. Since the US government is for sale to the highest bidder, and the corporations have no loyalty to the country, they will feed off the host until it can no longer sustain itself and then look for another host to feed off of.

If only that was to translate to cheaper hotel room prices in the US. Currently they are sky high.

Only a golden age for the uber wealthy.

Repairability would help as well. Many times the only viable option to fix something is to swap a board, or replace the entire item, instead of replacing the one failed component that caused the board to fail, or reflowing the board etc.. Many components also do not offer batteries that can be replaced, such as the magic mouse, so you end up needing to replace the entire item.

It's interesting how as certain things age, such as cars, cottage industries pop up to do just that when new replacement boards and parts are not available.

The other issue is cost cutting. Many components are made cheaply and fail pre-maturely. Great examples of this are mains voltage LED bulbs where the rectifier circuits that power the LED's fail, but the only real option is to replace the entire thing, creating a lot of e-waste in the process.

repairability would help quite a bit. How many times do you have to replace an entire board in something when replacing just a component would actually fix things?

You have a tree that is full of monkeys that you want to get out of the tree. So you shake the hell out of the tree to get rid of them.

How many are left when you are done? Same number, just in different branches.

and yet their revenues are not even 1 billion.

The political dance of NVIDIA:

1. Offshore jobs, maximize profits and take advantage of incentives to offshore. 2. Political winds shift. 3. Talk a good game about needing to onshore, make some token moves to move a small token amount of manufacturing back to the US. (You are here). 4. Once the admin changes and/or mid terms, continue to spend more on offshoring.

It would be interesting to see if the job prospects of American students and perception of the value of the degrees were to change if they were to eliminate the 15% discount that employers get for hiring foreign graduates (via OPT) by not having to pay FICA taxes.

When the unemployment rate for fresh American college grads is the same or higher than those without a degree, it does not make a compelling case for spending all of that money and time on a degree.

Assuming that one is in favor of the use of these cameras, the security issues seem like they are a big problem. The leaking of police officer personal data and locations was pretty egregious.

Would love to hear from one of the founders on what they are doing to address that.

Most places went off grid because of how unreliable the national grid is. The cost of that electricity is also significantly higher than it would have been with well run central grid using fossil fuel.

The lloyds numbers you shared show a steep decline in investment over the past three years.

The IDC is an arm of the South African government, so having it call itself a top investment destination is like having a marketer trying to sell you on their own product.

The UN report only shows the inflow by region, not country.

The PWC report shows everything being down with the exception of net operating cash flow which does not tell you a lot about the sector as a whole. Their predictions do not point to anything to substantiate their prediction of 5.7% per annum manufacturing GDP growth. Of course then again, if these numbers are not inflation adjusted and inflation is at or above 5.7% then that may be where that is coming from.

Given that the average GDP per person is 8k US a year, without a significant increase of the GDP it's not possible to increase the standard of living for the population has a whole. You can't get blood from a stone.

Back before digital became really high res I was into small, medium and large format silver halide cameras balancing cost with high quality optics. You could get Exackta's, Speed Graphics and Roleiflexes relatively inexpensively and take amazing high quality photos with them.

The larger you went though, the more you had to be mindful about the cost of eash shot both in terms of time and cost for film and developing. There is something to be said about the curation that happened when taking photos like that. You put a lot more though upfront into composition and had to think about your shutter speed, aperture etc..

One thing I learned about during that time was how the old time press photographers would use a Speed Graphic on 4x5 negative, grab a wide angled shot and then crop it. Also, press conferences used to create a lot of broken glass as photographers would snap a shot, shoot out the one time use flash bulb on the ground and then quickly put in another bulb to get another shot.

Actually, electricity production has gone down, while the price continues to outstrip inflation.

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

Because of this many companies are reducing staff or pulling out. https://businesstech.co.za/news/energy/837719/important-busi...

....and that's before we get into things like Transnet and SA Air. I'd love to see the country succeed, but putting your head in the sand and denying that there is a problem will not fix things.

Manufacturing and the economy are in trouble and have been for a number of years.

https://currencynews.co.za/manufacturing-meltdown-south-afri...

It sounds like you prefer communism over capitalism. Sadly, South Africa is heading towards communism. The only consolation is that then at least everybody will be poor.

The country is in decline. I have spent a lot of time there, have family who live there and can easily counter this:

- Many communities still rely on water trucks instead of water pipe infrastructure. The government loots the funds for it, meanwhile the entire system is on the verge of collapse and there are regular water shortages.

- With the electric grid, the amount of load shedding in the past few years where people are regularly without electric to 6-8 hours a day is absolutely crazy. The country didn't used to experience that. Also, cable theft is common, which wasn't an issue 30 years ago.

- 1.6 million people out of 66 million pay 76% of all taxes.

- Public healthcare in ZA is bad and not recommended by anybody who values their life.

- South Africa has more race laws today than it did during apartheid.

- It has a violent crime rate that is one of the highest in the world.

- Unemployment is high.

- It has suffered from massive underinvestment in infrastructure over the past 30 years.

- Extremely high levels of government corruption.

One thing that really brought home how the situation is in South Africa is was when I was talking to someone I know who works for a furniture company there. They used to make all of their furniture in the country, but recently started importing it from China because that is cheaper than producing it locally. Keep in mind that is with an average daily wage of $30 for a factory worker. If a country with South Africa's nature resources and inexpensive labor cannot compete with China for manufacturing furniture for the local market, it is deep trouble.

That is probably why the CEO of a local Tile Manufacturer recently said that South Africa is one of the worlds least manufacturing-friendly economies due to onerous regulation, infrastructure deterioration, energy uncertainty and rising costs.

What almost nobody in SV wants to talk about it the gutting of STEM in the early 90's when real wages for STEM began it's decline in the US via labor arbitrage. Of course Blank and most of Silicon Valley benefited from this, because it allowed them to get cheap, compliant labor. Eric Weinstein did a great paper on this years ago https://users.nber.org/~sewp/references/archive/weinsteinhow... . Looking at the current unemployment in STEM, which is higher than the national average, this arbitrage has just hit a point where it has killed the goose that laid his golden egg.

Reading the tea leaves, I think this incident may have more to do with politics than it being a real incident per se.

For the past 10 years the Ruby community had been co-opted by political activists. Things like COC's and the Contributor Covenant etc. started in the Ruby community. The activists went after many top contributors in the community because of personal political beliefs etc, instead of behavior in the community itself. Some even called for ejecting DHH, the creator of rails, and Matz, the creator of the language, from the community.

When the Overton window finally stopped shifting to the left and started to move right, a lot of people who had remained quiet due to real threats of loss of business, work etc. finally started to speak up. DHH was one of them and has been very outspoken with his beliefs that open source software should be a-political and open to all instead of the political purity tests the activists were pushing.

From what I observed, when I was in involved in the Ruby community, Arko appeared to be a political activist. While there may have been an actual security concern here, my guess is that this had more to do with a desire to not have someone who may have been involved in trying to eject the top creators in the community being a point of failure for key infrastructure for the Ruby ecosystem.

I don't think tariffs affected the numbers for the entire year that drastically since Trump had only been in office for 2 months out of the entire years period that this was looking at.

Boring lineup, Lack of recent innovation, poor repairability and a CEO who has alienated people on both sides of the political isle. The 1 trillion dollar package the board is offering Musk is a joke. They need to find a new CEO.

The goal is to encourage people to make things in the US and they are plugging the large hole first.

It will be interesting to see if they also apply more customs scrutiny to checked luggage for air travel when returning to the United States. Right now they are not. But, if you go to places like Costa Rica, which has had high tariffs on many imports for years, they make you scan all of your luggage when you enter the country and will stop and scrutinize what you are bringing in. CR will also periodically have raids on retailers who obtained goods that circumvented customers via things like clandestine border crossings.

There will be some secondary challenges with enforcement of this as some decide to roll the dice, import illegally and hope to not get caught. If there is enough of a price difference between buying something with a high tariff in the US vs locally I can also see some people travelling to Mexico or Canada to buy some higher dollar smaller items if the cost savings offsets the trip.

If this was to be implemented, you would see a large lobbying effort by the tech companies around how unemployment is calculated and these numbers would end up being under-reported to keep the supply of cheap labor coming in.

You will also start to see people with ties to big tech being hired to actually compile the data.