I really does feel like we're at the beginning of a major world conflict. That would suck an entire ass.
The only reason I don't see one happening is that we're too materially dependent on China. Last year's bullet shortage was because the lead and primers come from China. We can't make one of the hinge pieces for all 18-wheeler semi axles or wooden doors or half the basic inputs to anything complex. The US has always been considered invasion-safe because of its geography and size, and China is about as large with 4x the population and all of the factories. If they take out the Japanese bases and Guam, with 7th Fleet being so overstretched as-is that I don't see it surviving more than a week, the US would be stuck launching that invasion from its west coast and no real ability to resupply its military or homefront. An air war couldn't penetrate their defenses.
Last year’s bullet shortage was because the lead and primers come from China.
:michael-laugh:
china basically has all the advantages the U.S. did in the late 19th century with the U.S. standing in for the British Empire (and the rivalry between the two powers really reminds me of the U.S.-China one today and war was often on the table). just replace one ocean with the vastness of central Asia (the U.S. isn't driving an armored force from Europe).
I'm sure we can just drive our forces through Afghanistan. It can't be that hard, right?
naaaah of course not and we can even find replacement parts littered the entire way
Or we could drive along the coast between Cambodia and China.
Just imagined a caravan of convertibles with military personally just driving along the cost and getting bombed, very amusing!
America is far more obnoxious than Britain at the moment though, and we haven't had the hubris smacked out of us hard enough yet.
ha, valve's gonna have to abandon the Steam Deck before it's even out! That's gotta be a record, even for them.
It'll probably be items that use low end chips that suffer first. Like fridges, smart watches, microwaves etc as the margins for those chips are probably abysmal. (obvious solution would be to STOP MAKING EVERYTHING THE INTERNET OF THINGS) I know for the AMD and Intel CPUs for data centers are the real money makers versus selling at the consumer level.
If I recall valve is still using somewhat of a cutdown version of what's in the big consoles (PS & Xbox). And if I'm right as long as there are manufacturing defects that dont allow passing for a PS5, BUT are passing for a Steam Deck valve would be fine
The Steam Deck doesn't appear to use that design, it's a different APU (4 core, 8 threads compared to the 8 cores and 16 threads of the ps5), but AMD does put out some defective PS5 chips as a desktop board called the 4700S. There's likely to be a lot more repurposing of slightly out of spec hardware for other consumer devices, but while I may be wrong about this, I think the reason we haven't seen anything like this with the new Xboxes is because they actually just make all the chips targeting the Series X hardware, and those that don't quite make the cut get underclocked, paired with a more compact cooling system, and shipped out as the Series S.
Shit is gonna suck when I can't get funyons with my corn dog for lunch
I know it's not good, but I've got to say: the worse things get, the better I feel. It was that period of denial, those multiple attempts at re-opening and "going back to normal" when I felt the nost despondent. Now that things are getting really shitty I feel...I don't know, more alive?
I sort of enjoyed that it was everybody who were stuck at home, couldn't go to restaurants, couldn't go on exotic vacations, couldn't go to parties etc. Some of it was just enjoying how the world slowed down and became less noisy. Some of it was the feeling that finally there was a greater social project, something actually important that we were all working towards. The politicians were so scared that they cut out their racist bullshit and insufferable bickering for a while and listened to people who actually knew what they were talking about.
Some of it was also a sense of shared suffering. The nice explanation was that now everyone was stuck at home and couldn't have any fun, I no longer felt alone and like a freak for having lived like that most of my life. There was an awareness that living like this really sucks. The less nice explanation is good old-fashioned schadenfreude, finally all these spoilt pricks who have always skated through life and looked down on people like me and made .e feel like shit for not being born with a silver spoon up my ass and a brain that didn't short-circuit whenever I am around other people were feeling just a little of what I have always been dealing with and these weak-ass fucks were absolutely loosing their minds over not being able to go to a restaurant.
Wasn't there some pop psychology thing about this? Something about how during horrible years in the 20th century, some people who normally felt horrible were feeling better?
"Misery loves company". If you're normally depressed and hopeless, seeing other people go nuts is a bit of a comfort.
There was a bit in Robert "IsAFed" Evans's It Could Happen Here about some studies conducted on people's mental health conditions improving and people having greater feelings of personal fulfillment during wartime but I cannot for the life of me remember any info specific enough to look up the studies to cite them.
oh yes I operate best in crisis conditions tbh. I like seeing people's various delusions about life now be aggressively shut down by reality. Too many people care about frivolous things that will soon not matter so much. I also hunger for the coming dawn so it's exciting when things look like they may collapse soon.
I like seeing people’s various delusions about life now be aggressively shut down by reality.
:sicko-hyper:
and it was ME who was the pessimist
you know I don't even think I'm that pessimistic compared to doomers I just don't think people are going to be willing to challenge capitalism/the government until material conditions decay more. Once people wake up from the treat comas then we can finally get serious about tearing down and rebuilding society. The USA seems to be past stagnation now, things are actively getting worse and yet still no solution in sight... now the people are getting restless :sicko-yes:
with organization there are many exciting possibilities for the left in the future if we can seize them
Unironically, mentally preparing to live out the rest of my days on a barren, war-torn husk of a world is orders of magnitudes less depressing than mentally preparing to live out the rest of my days as a wage slave.
at least in the former I can have some sort of project healing the land/people post-cool zone. The latter is literally just exploitation until death so Zuckerberg gets enough money to build a Facebook-enabled Space Station
The average western treat enjoyer is only three missed gadgets from full and open fascism.
I don’t see how this type of thing gets remedied
Maybe I am too pessimistic but it seems much more likely to me that things get worse than better
We actually dumped tons of vaccines on Taiwan particularly to induce them to keep the fabs churning (and to send them here instead of our western "allies."). The vaccines will flow wherever US geopolitical interests lie.
The vaccines will flow wherever US geopolitical interests lie.
Whoever controls the vax controls the universe
Unfortunately when it comes to these kinds of semiconductor chips, the lead time is just catastrophic when a spike in demand or squeeze in supply happens. It takes months to get a production line up and running, and in excess of a year to build a new factory. Tech companies bet on demand for consumer electronics dropping with a downturn in general economy, and unfortunately that ended up being one of the few sectors that exploded during lockdowns, so they cut orders for chips only a couple months before they'd need more than they ever have, and we're still trying to play catch-up to months of elevated demand. It's going to take a long time for things to equalize again.
Sure but it’s the interconnectedness and complexity of it all that worries me
We need much more robust industrial policy. All these firms trying to corner markets with IP for proprietary chipsets need to be flayed alive and everyone needs to settle on standardized chips. There's no reason smartphone manufacturers should be designing their own proprietary silicon. There's no reason auto manufacturers should be designing their own proprietary silicon. This shit should be interchangeable.
The desire of fabs to produce the most complex, smallest scale, highest margin chips means that perfectly serviceable 5-10 year old technology gets put on endless backorder and it is fucking everything straight to hell. The market, predictably, will not solve this problem. Particularly as long as semiconductor manufacturing is viewed as a geopolitically strategic industry (as well as one where superprofits are reaped) and productive capacity is limited to the global north.
As usual, This Machine Kills explored this problem in incredible depth (its behind the paywall though :( ).
eh so what processor speed growth slowing just means we'll need to learn to use what we have more efficiently
I'm such a fucking treat boy that my mind immediately went to crisps fml
All electronics manufacturers founded after 1990 knows is to be bisexual, charge they phone, eat hot chip and lie.
They were definitely living fat on the hog of supple chip supply.
Dang, thought they'd have payed the frito-lays employs more already.
4000 series will be out by the time this chip shortage is over.
Fucking 5000 series will be out by the time it's over.
