On a less deranged take, there’s definitely potential to mend the Sino-Soviet split. Their interests and capabilities dovetail quite a bit, but I suspect unification is wildly impractical for any number of cultural and historic reasons. OTOH, if they presented a Warsaw Pact-style alliance, perhaps using the cudgel of mutually assured economic destruction instead of nuclear destruction, that’s a hell of an act for the West to try to follow.

TBH, I sort of wonder the history of why they push the LGBT repression so hard in Russia.

In a place like the US, where you have culture war manifested through elections, it’s an easy way to score points with a specific and identified demographic/donor group. Demonize the gays and then you don’t have to lean on other voters who will ask about why the schools are failing and the economy is spiraling.

Does the Russian political system have such pressure groups?

I could sort of see it as part of a larger suite of “traditional values/restore past glory” messaging, but even there, it seems low on the checklist, and again, is there even meaningful campaigning where it pays dividends?

The immigration angle is bait and switch politicking. Has been for decades.

People feel economically stagnant and culturally disconnected.

Couldn’t be the capitalist machine grinding you to dust while gnawing away any sort of social institutions or greater visions than “line goes up”. It’s clearly Juan or Abdul who are scrabbling to send a few dollars or Euros to their family. Excluding them is gonna roll back the clock to when a single worker could get a no-degree factory job straight out of high school and raise a sitcom-style family of four, you know!

Monster Musume. It’s far better than the premise would lead you to believe. Rachnera best girl, incidentally.

I have a similar one, different seller and possibly submodel, but also a refurb HGST 12T enterprise drive. It sounds like I left a soda on my desk most of the time, subtly popping and ticking.

I’ve heard the power efficiency is less “unique to ARM” and more due to different performance priorities of current x86 designs. The Apple M-series targets a different power/performance tradeoff than Intel and AMD.

Recent Ryzens, for example, often can be set in an “Eco mode” for, say, 80% of the performance at 50% of the energy usage, just by tweaking clocks and voltages. A full-out efficient design x86 could probab;y do even better.

That’s working so well with the DPRK, though.

And Russia has a lot more resources and infrastructure to dig in with.

This is a series that has no business being as good as it is.

It’s obvious fetish bait, but you’ve got interesting characters and more of a plot and backstory than you’d imagine.

If done right, it could be a positive curator. Rules like “any drivers you get off of Windows update met certain tests, are not padded with unrelated crapware, etc.”

But I suspect that won’t fly. My main experience with WU drivers is a tendency to replace new drivers with old, broken ones. And I doubt printer makers-- the guys who made a 600MB driver to do the same tasks that a LaserJet 4 did with a 30k driver 30 years ago-- would play ball.

I guess I’m the only one who LIKES the latching plug.

The less economic and tech dependencies China has on the West, the more free they are to act on their own accord.

The US is concerned about Taiwan-- they wrote a blank cheque of support because it was a DeMoCrAcY back when China was a far weaker economy and military, and it will now be very difficult and expensive to stop reunification. Using TSMC as a shield is no doubt part of policy-- “invade and we blow the tech world back to 2010” is a viable threat until other countries get 7/5/3nm.

But their fear is more general; they are losing their economic and geopolitical dominance, and one of their big bulwarks-- advanced tech-- is giving way. They’re trying to hype up the fear and concern. Expect a lot more sabre rattling by the West.