Could be part of some existing agreement. Maybe they're duplicates of things on display and this way they can lend them to another country for viewing and hedge against the country falling apart and looting.

Egypt would never attack the occupation of Palestine, the US wouldn't let them and Sissi seems compliant. So the only other things I can think of would be either an expectation of a regional conflict with Hezbollah and Iran that gets very intense (with Egypt on the side of the US probably so on the receiving end) and/or their military and/or people rising up and a civil war or collapse situation emerging because they're very upset about the genocide happening next door while their US puppet leader does nothing.

Exciting things happening. Russia has no reason anymore to uphold UN sanctions that it earlier voted for against the DPRK now that it itself is isolated and subjected to blockade by the west.

Another win for the policy of unity among Marxists, not among liberals, opportunists, and distorters of Marxism (yes that includes especially ultras).

That community used to be on this instance too before it was made to move. 🙄 The creator of it still posts here all the time in a different com and calls themselves a Marxist or Maoist or something which is certainly an interesting thing to call oneself while holding such thoughts.

Yes, yes liberals are clueless about power and the nature of the state, violence etc. Little digression:

Russia is too hesitant and weak on the west. I get they are afraid of escalation but I wish these Russian liberals would get it through their skulls that the west is over for them, they aren't going to come to terms with them that work for Russia, they're not going to get sanctions relief and in fact taking too long to recognize the threat landed them in this long boondoggle of a war in the first place.

I just don’t get people who tolerate them. As someone who’s spent years blocking and avoiding them (arrrr) they just seem unnatural and infuriating but to so many people used to them they’re just an accepted part of life.

Basically it looks like decoupling is continuing apace.

The US is in a spiral here and I don't see any way it stops and there's a feedback effect on China whether they like it or not. This will not help China, it will slow China's progress somewhat. It will hurt the western proletariat.

Basically the more they do this, the more China has to take actions to secure their own ability to do things by investing in domestic manufacturing. The more they do that, the more the hawks in the US point to it as a threat that China is going to do that to industry x soon as well (despite the fact China only does this in response to these kinds of moves) and uses it to justify more decoupling in yet another industry. China has to keep pace with this and eventually will probably start guessing industries the US is going to do this to next (as you can't spin things up in a day you have to) which adds further ammo to the deranged borger-imperialists idea that they have to have "clean" (free from China) supply chains.

In practice of course they can't entirely eliminate China from the supply chains but they know that, it's just banter from the more ignorant politicians but the point all along is to secure the heights of technology. So sure China can produce precursors to advanced medical drugs and such which are laundered through Vietnam and drive up prices in the west BUT China cannot be allowed to directly export the drugs, to enter into partnerships with US or European companies in any way that gives them and not the west the advantage, they can't be allowed to get graduates from top university programs in the US and so on.

And they've done this with high technology, with AI, with green energy, with social media, and now this.

In other words, doubters be banished, this is full cold war 2.0, the sanctions, the blockade. There will be trade of course, more than between the US and USSR but the US will seek to taper even that and shift resources to India, etc this and next decade. Unfortunately the US likely has enough plundered loot and momentum to see at least some of this plan through and cause horrible problems for the global south and annoyances and growing pains, stunting to China for at least the foreseeable future, into next decade I'd say.

What's interesting is this is being done at the west's pace. It is not China calling the shots. The west is being cautious, acting slowly, methodically, prying away one industry at a time rather than passing blanket bans and making it known to increasing amounts of businesses in various sectors that it's not safe to invest or do business in China because you could be cut off any time by these kinds of things. This is designed to have a chilling effect on anyone involved in anything more advanced than making clothing or McDonalds meals toys there.

China doesn't want to provoke the west for several reasons. One being I think they want this process to happen as slow as possible so they can take maximum advantage of what trade they have until the last moment. The other being delaying war which they don't want but the US is dead set on. Sadly by doing this they hand US the power to act freely and without any caution or consideration to Chinese retaliation. There are definitely arguments to be made for China trying to gut-punch the US economy in retaliation for these sanctions. Which yes would spur more and more quickly but would cause a lot of short-term pain and who knows could even get enough bourgeoisie off the side-lines to slow down or stop it though it seems unlikely. If China were to do such a thing, I'd advocate doing it very soon, soon enough that the US economy tanks before the election so Biden loses and Trump may maybe feel a little bit that China helped him which won't go that far in relations but at least flexes power. Then again it could lead to a war. So many variables. The Chinese route is one of caution, but the US knows this and plans around it.

Please empire die already. Let me see free computing within my lifetime.

Another day, another curious question from a person known for them.

We've been discussing Russia's situation and the war for years now here. Given the west's response to Ukraine, given the amount of troops Russia has committed to Ukraine already, given how long this war has gone on and will likely continue to go on with western support before Russia achieves victory.

Do you think they should have just nuked the Fins and Swedes to take them out of the picture? Used some imaginary lever they have called "crash nordic economies". What pressure and what ability do they have to stop them other than military force in a full on invasion that they don't have the troops for? And which would put them in a direct conflict with NATO and fully realize and cement the idea in Europe that Russia is expansionist and aggressive and must be put down no matter what.

Now the better question is why did they allow the baltics to join NATO? Why didn't they draw the line sooner and stop the expansion eastward? And the answer is Putin is a naive liberal, Russia was very weak after the collapse of the USSR and frankly they couldn't afford and still couldn't afford to get into a full war with NATO. He believed in Minsk, he was a sucker who resisted the reality because he wanted to avoid conflict. Yes in a magical scenario where Russia's economy didn't matter, where they'd fully implemented war communism and could conscript tens of millions of willing, eager to fight and die Russians they could probably beat the Europeans bloody senseless and mess up the face of the US pretty bad but that's not the reality. That hasn't been a reality since the 1980s when the USSR existed.

I mean you're getting into liberal fantasy land of Asiatic hordes and Russia just being able to conjure up huge armies to wage war on the entire west and defeat them. To say nothing of the liberal nature of Russia's leaders meaning they don't want this and have always wanted integration and cooperation for profit and only begrudgingly at the last hour finally realized the threat and took action against Ukraine. And even now it shows Putin is a compromising guy. He hates doing this, he doesn't like fighting the west and he has delusions of them compromising sooner or later that I think are hurting the overall strategic vision for Ukraine by the Russian military. He still thinks after this is over that after a bit of time he can go back to selling Europe gas and oil and slowly re-integrating. Some Russian thinkers declare the door to the west is closed and Russia has started to pivot to the east but they really don't want to, the leadership like Putin wants to believe they can get back in with Europe.

Probably fine but not the most ideal.

Right now the market for SSDs sucks. Before the latest price-gouging via chopping supply in half (Crucial happily going along with Samsung's openly announced plans to do just that to get prices up) I got a 1TB TLC drive for $60, now they're all $110+ without exception.

For a main OS drive where you're getting lots of random reads on start-up and during normal operation, DRAM helps a decent amount to prevent waiting (with things like big games loading lots of files this is obvious as is on an OS disk where lots of random reads occur as part of normal operations). It's definitely something I think most people would notice between an NVMe drive with DRAM vs one without. Maybe not as much vs a SATA SSD under most work-loads.

Also OP you should realize most SATA SSD's (even cheap ones that were name-brand), except ones in the last few years typically had a DRAM cache, it used to be standard, it's only with NVMe that they've started dropping it to save money because the write/read speeds on NVMe drives sorta mask the lack of it under many but not all workloads (particularly for extra drives people were buying for non-OS installs like drives just to put games or large files on that are in addition to their main drive it matters less).

With that TBW I'd suspect it's a QLC drive (and confirmed by searching). I always used to avoid them myself but these days with these prices if you're looking for a deal it may be hard not to though the combination of QLC and no DRAM makes me think it's less than ideal for an OS drive. Just make sure you have a decent back-up plan for important documents and files to another drive or the cloud as when SSD's fail (and even good MLC/TLC drives can) they do so catastrophically and you won't be able to recover a thing.

For reference QLC/TLC/MLC stands for quad-level, triple-level, multi-level(2). There's also SLC or single-level. SLC is the oldest and most reliable, charges stay stable longer, the whole platter is more stable. Each increase decreases the cost per GB but hits reliability. The less bits per cell the more stable it tends to be, less prone to charge flips, better write speed potentials, it degrades more slowly and has more re-write cycles. But it costs more of course.

MLC is very pricey, easily twice the price per terabyte, but TLC is usually only a bit of a premium, maybe another $20-$30 (the T500 from Crucial for instance has DRAM and it's TLC for $35 more which isn't cheap admittedly but I guess it depends on where you are financially and if you plan to use this for a while. There's also the SK hynix Gold P31 which is TLC, DRAM, and $5 cheaper than the T500 at least where I looked).

Verdict: If you're looking for something in this price range (<$80) then definitely go with what you've chosen. However if you game or want something a bit more reliable with higher TBW, a bit faster, and with DRAM so you don't have to worry about that bottleneck on an OS drive AND you can afford the extra money I'd consider strongly something TLC, with DRAM, or both, like the drives I mentioned.

There is no such creature as the journalist at national outlets and most local ones of renown. It is a myth. There is only the propagandist, the agent of the bourgeoisie, the agent of empire. The Goebbels in every respect with twice the blood on their hands and ten times as much guilt.

The problem with threats like this is the west hasn’t and never will face the plethora of well armed and trained, organized, and intel supplied insurgencies that Russia and others in the axis of resistance face because the west are the ones who have spent years, decades cultivating them.

I’ve often thought of this but let’s say you want to hit the US. There are no groups you could give it to. The cartels in Mexico would never provoke the US like that and they’re the closest to a non-west affiliated armed organization (with greater than a few dozen members who could easily be killed) operating within 3000 miles of the US. Same in Europe. Most Russia could do without starting a war by handing them to a group not currently fighting and telling them to start would be to target the Zionist occupation of Palestine by handing such weapons over to groups in that region.

So it’s an empty threat without years of groundwork and millions of dollars. The only real options Russia has are to put more weapons into the Middle East that will stay and be used there or to directly strike without hope of denial or obfuscation at the west or their client states directly which looks like escalation.

Meh. I would have respected them more for at least trying to finish the trilogy of Prometheus and Covenant. Problematic as they were they were at least more interesting from a lore perspective than inserting other random Alien encounters magically retconned into existence between the existing films which is kind of a low effort, low risk, low pay-out thing to do. And one that I might add seriously risks adding retcons or changes to the magic and feeling of the original trilogy.

They'll never come close to touching the quality of the first two films (3 if you count the Assembly cut which really made 3 a much better film) and if you just want jump-scares and gore and horror certainly continuing the Prometheus storyline could give you some of that.

Lol. When you're supposed to be spreading propaganda for the CIA and destabilizing China but really you're just pocketing most of the money and running various scams instead and they finally notice.

No.

The grievances and gripes people have which are highlighted as the likely cause of division and a speculative civil war are mostly smokescreen culture war bullshit that exist for media spectacle and politicking. Beating up on minorities isn’t something that’s going to drive a big chunk of liberals to fight. Material issues are not seen in class terms. It’s seen in matters of bickering about policy like tax policy or war spending which is true to a degree but it’s a lost in the illusion thing. Conditions worsen but the illusion remains.

The media and parties and grifters stir up mild tension for profit and distraction but have little real interest in it coming to an actual protracted fight. Sure reactionaries wouldn't and don't mind killing some progressives or leftists now and again but the left isn't large enough, organized enough, etc to actually fight back nor the citizenry informed enough outside the bourgeois press propaganda bubble to get involved after an outrage.

The mythos of the holy American institutions, the holy government, the holy constitution and system still holds strong. As long as that is the alter at which all Americans worship at I don't think a civil war can happen.

Only when a significant part of the population make a sustained break from that might something happen. And for that to really occur you need much worse material conditions. There are cracks, the Republican resistance to Ukraine and increasing skepticism of neo-cons (which probably won't last beyond the day Trump is elected), the crushing of Palestinian student protests and the disenchantment that has. But neither I see as things that can grow in the short term.

If there is a civil war it will be decades from now when the contradictions have heightened, the empire has visibly fallen and Americans can only bicker among themselves and fight over increasingly limited spoils and take from each other. But it will take a severe split in the bourgeoisie or genuine anti-capitalist sentiment that rocks the youth of that time. Frankly with how atomized the population is, with technology, with the surveillance state, it's going to get really, really, really bad before it gets even a little bit better in terms of people pushing back.

If anything I think all the mainstream talk of civil war is yet another sign we're not headed there soon. It's a kind of outlet, to let the public collectively explore the idea, enjoy it, hate it, fear it, whatever rather than actually experiencing it. It's part of the broader attempts at controlling the narrative too. There is this idea being pushed that the reason we're at risk for civil war is not any of the real problems like fascists, bigotry, support of genocide, living in a genocidal violent empire, BUT that people are seeing outside agitator "propaganda" from Russia, China, etc. It's part and parcel of the push to ban Tiktok, to crack down on anyone spreading views counter to the state department line, to label them a real enemy. Because by tying it to that they're no longer just a "kook" with a weird conspiracy opinion but a danger to the precious and holy American institutions and a threat of causing civil war if we don't crack down on them and crack down on those giving them those ideas. So it's really part of a push to control information, to control it online in social media, to block foreign media and perspectives. And to censor and deplatform anyone deviating from the "bipartisan" imperialist consensus as a foreign agent, as a chaos actor, as someone trying to destroy the US. It really all started with Trump and the liberal derangement and Russiagate hoax around him.

I'm not sure it's pathetic so much as part of a calculated water testing strategy. It lessens the upset and shock from the public because it's already been hashed out a bit so it's less surprising and it also forewarns and lets the Russians toss it around before pushing forward anyways and pretending they're doing so with great reluctance so the escalation seems less obvious/bad. The truly sad part is Germans buying this show thinking they have any independence in all this.

State charges though right? Don't think they can send him to serve it out of state in a federal prison for those. Not sure if states have comfy prisons as I think most white collar more bourgeois criminals tend to commit federal crimes or at least get nailed for them first.

We're not anywhere near a revolutionary moment. 30% of the country is convinced Russian influence operations control a lot of the country and installed Trump and are trying to destroy the US entirely. 40% of the country (overlapping with above somewhat) is convinced China is trying to destroy and control us with tik-tok and the rest are mostly too tired, too beat down by bad labor conditions and life to care to think on it one way or the other.

US civil war is a meme. It's not happening anytime soon, even the strongest moments of BLM were minor and the US is far too good at managing things at home and distracting the masses. We're decades out from discontent and economic conditions getting bad enough that there's anything resembling an insurrection and it won't be red states vs blue states but uprisings in cities that grow and grow and refuse to be extinguished as they get more intense.

World war it is then if you're right. And likely nuclear because Russia can't win against US and NATO without devastating losses and a huge mandatory mobilization. China won't intervene because that's against their foreign policy. The DPRK could I suppose decide letting the US host nuclear weapons in the occupied south is unacceptable and launch an attack to retake the south and catch the US with their pants down but I'm skeptical they will either.

Though I suppose Russia could blink at the last moment and decide they'll tolerate a heavily armed, NATO-ified rump state on their border rather than go to nuclear war. Russia's reluctance all along has worsened things for them and I'm not entirely convinced they're over it. The amount of times they talk about wanting talks comes off as almost pleading really which signals weakness to the vicious west and I'm afraid probably could lead to escalation from the west mis-analyzing all this as a sign that if they just push them a bit more they'll sue for peace or give up. Then again this all could also just be western bluff and bluster and they could be out of ideas other than playing Nixon's "madman" card against Russia and hoping they back down.

Related digression: I really don't understand why so many people here and on hexbear have this idea that it's impossible for him to go to prison, when no it's impossible for him to face consequences for doing things presidents are supposed to do like imperialism, it's very possible for them to destroy him and ruin his life to permanently remove him from the picture because he's an annoyance to the deep institutions of state and imperial power.

They simply pretend the issue is he acted in some way differently than other presidents, pearl-clutch about institutions and rules of how you're supposed to do corruption with all your I's dotted and T's crossed. It doesn't matter if Biden and his son are corrupt as fuck, it doesn't matter if the next person is as well. Consistency has never been a necessity so long as they can pretend there is some difference. And at the end of the day as much as reactionaries will hoot and holler, all the actually violent fascist militias are on a short FBI leash and none of them are going to do any meaningful violence against institutional liberals or the state in response if he's sent up the river for the rest of his natural life.

It'll just become another gripe, another issue in their culture war ranting and it'll become a plank of the party and candidates to try and secure his release. Fact is Democrats are competent administrators of empire and I think honestly there's a decent chance CIA, the deep parts of the state and intelligence apparatus have decided to go with them for a while and make an example out of Trump for trying to do petty gangsterism with their sophisticated empire and generally making them look as bad as they are with silly things like saluting generals in the DPRK which really rubs these kind of institutional American greatness mytho weirdos the wrong way. It'll in a way get the reactionaries plenty worked up and perfect for unleashing on the growing left as a result of the Palestinian genocide and other situations unfold. They'll be let to vent their anger beating up and killing anti-genocide protestors, antifa, communist meetings, and anyone left of the State Dept on China.

I don't think Trump is smart enough to have some reasonable memory of classified secrets or some way to leak them to punish the US state and threaten it if it tries to send him to prison.

Best case he gets out after spending a little time in prison, wins the election and begins brutal recriminations against the Democratic party and Biden's administration. Real let them fight hours. Worst case he goes to prison, stays there, rots there, liberals clink their champagne glasses, declare the institutions have won, America is back, brunch is on and continue with the whole charade of calling all dissent against the DNC and US foreign policy "Russian propaganda". I just find smug liberals so annoying so naturally I want them to suffer and honestly the more they do the more the illusion crumbles I think.