They just elected Claudia Sheinbaum, who is seen as being extremely close to the outgoing president AMLO. Some people were suggesting that she was so close to him that it was really his way of getting another term as president, similar to how Putin stepped down as president of Russia to become PM while Dmitry Medvedev became president in name only.

How true is that? It’s hard to say. My guess is that a lot of it is sexism, thinking that a woman can’t think for herself and a woman president will turn to someone else for the important decisions.

But, it’s true that under AMLO, there was a lot of democratic backsliding in Mexico. OTOH, Mexico has been dominated by PAN and PRI for decades. In fact, PRI won 14 elections in a row between 1928 and 1994. It wasn’t until Vincente Fox in 2000 that PAN was even a factor. So, there’s a lot of the power structures in Mexico geared towards supporting PRI and PAN.
They were probably undermining a lot of the things AMLO wanted to accomplish. If he had followed all the rules and norms he might not have been able to accomplish anything because the establishment would have blocked everything he tried to do. That doesn’t excuse his rule and law breaking, but it does contextualize it.

We’ll see what happens with Sheinbaum. I, for one, am fucking thrilled that Mexico’s president has a PhD in energy engineering. The fact she’s a woman is also historical, but to me the doctorate is more important.

It’s pretty telling about how much Americans know about other countries that the assumption is that Jus Soli is the norm.

Depending on what happens with GPUs for datacenters, external GPUs might be so rare that nobody does it anymore.

My impression right now is that for nVidia gamer cards are an afterthought now. Millions of gamers can’t compete with every company in Silicon Valley building entire datacenters stacked with as many “GPUs” as they can find.

AMD isn’t the main choice for datacenter CPUs or GPUs. Maybe for them, gamers will be a focus, and there are some real advantages with APUs. For example, you’re not stuck with one particular amount of GPU RAM and a different amount of CPU RAM. Because you’re not multitasking as much when gaming, you need less CPU RAM, so you can dedicate more RAM to games and less to other apps. So, you can have the best of both worlds: tons of system RAM when you’re browsing websites and have a thousand tabs open, then start a game and you have gobs of RAM dedicated to the game.

It’s probably also more efficient to have one enormous cooler for a combined GPU and CPU vs. a GPU with one set of heatsinks and fans and a separate CPU heatsink and fan.

External GPUs are also a pain in the ass to manage. They’re getting bigger and heavier, and they take up more and more space in your case. Not to mention the problems their power draw is causing.

If I could get equivalent system performance with an APU vs. a combined CPU and GPU, I’d probably go for it, even with the upgradeability concerns. OTOH, soldered-in RAM is not appealing because I’ve upgraded my RAM more often than other components on my PCs, and having to buy a whole new motherboard to get a RAM upgrade is not appealing.

The Crypto to AI transition was brutal. Just as demand for GPUs was coming down because people were starting to use ASICs to mine Bitcoin, along comes AI to drive up non-gaming demand again.

The only good news is that eventually when the AI bubble pops there will be massive R&D and manufacturing geared towards producing GPUs. Unless something else comes along… But really, I can’t see that happening because the AI bubble is so immense and is such an enormous part of the entire world’s economy.

It’s also not capitalism.

Adam Smith is seen as the person most responsible for coming up with the concept of capitalism, and he hated landlords.

“Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery. The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.”

More details about what he thought of rent in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

Adam Smith imagined a world with well-regulated capitalism. In that world, a capitalist might invest in a factory to make a widget. They’d take raw materials, use capital (including labour) and end up with a product that people would want to buy. That capitalist would always have to stay on their toes because if they got lazy, another capitalist could undercut them by using their capital better, to either undercut the widget’s price, or to sell it more cheaply. This competition was key, as well as the idea of the capitalist putting in work to continuously improve their processes. A capitalist who didn’t continually improve their processes would lose to their competitors, see their widget sales drop to zero, and go out of business.

In Adam Smith’s time, the alternative to capitalism was feudalism, where a landlord owned a huge estate, had serfs working on that estate, and simply collected a cut of everything the serfs produced as rent. In that scenario, the landlord had to do almost no work. It was the farmers on their estate who did the work. The landlord just owned the land and charged rent. Originally, serfs were even tied to the land, so they weren’t allowed to leave to work elsewhere, and their children were bound to the same land. But, even once that changed, there was still good farmland. The landlord could lower the rent until it was worth it for a farmer to work the land. The key thing is that the landlord didn’t have to do anything at all, just own the land and charge rent for its use.

I think the reason that people are so pissed off with capitalism these days is that what we’re really seeing is a neo-Feudalism, or what Yanis Varoufakis calls technofeudalism.

Think of YouTube. A person puts tons of time and money into making a video, they upload it to the only viable video platform for user-made video, YouTube. YouTube hosts the video, then charges a big cut of any advertising revenue the video generates, basically charging rent for merely being the “land” on which the video lives. In a proper capitalist world, there would be plenty of sites to host videos, plenty of ad companies competing to buy ad spots for a video, etc. But, YouTube is a monopoly, and internet advertising is a duopoly between Google and Facebook. They mostly don’t even compete anymore, each has their own area of the Internet they control and so they’re a local monopoly. This allows them to behave like feudal lords rather than capitalists. There’s no need for them to innovate, no need for them to compete, they just own the land and charge rent. Same with Apple and their app store. There are no other app stores permitted on iPhones, so Apple can charge an outrageous 30%.

It goes well beyond tech though. Say you’re a Canadian and you want to avoid American products, but you love your carbonated beverages. You could buy Coke, but that’s American. Pepsi? That’s American. Royal Crown cola? Sure sounds like it might be Canadian, or British, but no, it’s American. Just look at the chain of mergers for its parent company: “Formed in July 2018, with the merger of Keurig Green Mountain and Dr Pepper Snapple Group (formerly Dr. Pepper/7up Inc.), Keurig Dr Pepper offers over 125 hot and cold beverages.” Sure, if you look you can find specialty things like Jarritos, but the huge brands just dominate the shelves.

Capitalists hate capitalism, they want to be feudal lords, and since the time of Reagan / Thatcher / Mulroney / etc. competition hasn’t been properly regulated, allowing all the capitalists to merge into enormous companies that no longer have to compete, and can instead act as feudal lords extracting rent.

And there are lawyers who have been raked over the coals by judges when the lawyers have submitted AI-generated documents where the LLM “hallucinated” cases that didn’t exist which were used as precedents.

As an aside, it’s interesting how “Jack Daniel’s” is the brand name, with the apostrophe-s ending. It makes it a bit difficult to construct sentences talking about it. If you write “the maker of Jack Daniel’s is Brown-Foreman” it makes it seem like you misused an apostrophe or forgot a noun, like it should be “the maker of Jack Daniel’s whiskey is Brown-Foreman”, but that’s also wrong because it’s not the whiskey belonging to Jack Daniel, who’s dead.

AFAIK Canada can do it quickly because most liquor stores are government owned and run (LCBO in Ontario for example), whereas in Mexico it’s individual retailers. And many of the retailers in Mexico are American chains: Wal*Mart, Costco, etc. If Soriana and Chedraui wanted they could stop selling American booze, but they’re for-profit companies that are probably thinking they’ll just let their customers choose if they want to boycott.

Coke is American too. Unfortunately Royal Crown Cola is too (not only the original brand, but also the current megaconglomerate overlord).

But, it would be fun to replace the “Jack and Coke” with “Crown Royal and Royal Crown”.

I hope the next guy who Luigi’s a CEO legally changes his/her name to John Smith or Jane Johnson or something extremely common.

I’m curious, what was hard to figure out? I assume it was something federation-related?

I never really had a problem figuring things out (though I’m sure there are still things I could learn). The only difficulty was that when I was subscribing to communities, it was sometimes hard to know which was the “main” or “most popular” community. For instance, there are half a dozen fairly big gaming communities spread across various lemmy instances. Some get more posts, some get more comments. Reddit also had a few different gaming-related communities, but it was easier to figure out which were the bigger ones and which ones had a slightly different focus.

My point that we’re never going to see another user influx on the scale of the summer 2023

You never know. When Digg did a redesign basically all the Digg users fled to Reddit. You never know what is going to be the last straw. And since we’re dealing with network effects, there can be this feedback mechanism where people leaving leads to more people leaving. It’s hard to predict when something’s going to tip over.

IMO, it’s just a matter of time. Reddit wasn’t profitable and now that they’re public their investors are going to demand growth and profit. That means enshittifying the site, and one of those changes is going to be too much. It could go on for years, but I’d be shocked if Reddit is still around in 10 years.

If you say so.

In the past this wasn’t true, but it’s definitely true for new tech products.

There are 2 reasons for that, IMO.

1. Tech investors expect year after year, decade after decade of serious growth
2. Tech these days is not something you buy, it’s rarely even something you rent, it’s often free and paid for by shoving ads at you

That means that they can’t just land on a good product and stick with it. They have to keep changing it to try to get more engagement, more use, more growth.

Why do you need all those things to be in one single app?

I really like the CBC, and it’s the news source I use most often.

But, even if the CBC isn’t your preferred source of Canadian news, you should still support their continued funding. They’re the only major news source that doesn’t rely on advertising or subscriptions. That means their coverage doesn’t have to be sensational, it doesn’t have to avoid offending advertisers. Some people might worry that it does have to worry about offending the government, but it’s been almost 80 years and they keep reporting the facts on the ground. That’s not like the Bezos-owned Washington Post who are having to completely recalibrate how they report things to suit his preferences.

Even if you don’t like the CBC, they keep every other media outfit in line by just being a facts-based alternative that people can switch over to. And sure, they have some institutional bias, they’re conservative in the old sense of changing slowly and respecting norms and traditions. But, personally I blame a lot of the chaos in the US on there not being a CBC-equivalent.

The US doesn’t have any calm, boring, state-funded national media outlet that everybody grudgingly agrees is more or less honest. Sure, they have NPR and PBS but those are not on the same scale per capita as CBC. And, while they’re publicly funded, they’re not proper news gathering and reporting organizations like CBC news.

It’s not enough to have news sources that are not biased towards left or right. Just look at CNN. It’s generally not seen as a GOP or Democratic news org. But, it’s still extremely sensationalist. Rather than covering important political news, they’ll show car chases or fires or whatever prevents people from changing the channel.

We lose CBC and we get the Fox-Newsification of Canada, misinformation and disinformation spreading so nobody knows what’s true anymore. That kills the country.

Any NATO member increasing their military spending would be idiotic to spend their money with US-based companies.

The checks and balances were never what they were advertised to be. They haven’t really been corrupted, just revealed to be more something people followed out of convention than an actual working system.

The US founding fathers were a bunch of mainly rich dudes, mostly in their 20s, from the 1700s. Their knowledge was limited to what a rich kid could in the 1700s. They had a decent grasp on how the English parliamentary system worked, some vague ideas of how systems worked in ancient Rome and Greece, they’d read a bunch of philosophers, and had a lot of youthful enthusiasm.

They come from a time 200 years before Game Theory and a century before the beginnings of Political Science. When they came up with these checks and balances, they didn’t do it in any kind of formal way, trying to attack the system as a clever adversary would. There were all kinds of assumptions baked into their models of how the system would work that they never questioned. As a result, their system of checks and balances doesn’t stand up to a popular party that wants the US to be a dictatorship.

I know this isn’t the point, but IMO a suit really is a clown nose.

Like, you’re tying a little bit of colourful fabric around your neck and letting it dangle down? That’s supposed to look serious? This is the clothing associated with a serious man?

And you’re wearing a coat that doesn’t close properly? It only has buttons at the bottom, then has the male equivalent of a “boob window” for you to show off your shirt and tie?

And don’t get me started on how the suit technically has pockets, but you’re not actually supposed to use them because they ruin the look… except for the breast pocket where you’re supposed to put a fully decorative hanky.

Look at me! I’m conforming! I don’t have independent thoughts! I wear a suit!

I mean… it might make the eggs cost less relative to other things.