He/him. Chinese born, Canadian citizen. University student studying environmental science, hobbyist programmer. Marxist-Leninist.
Replace socialism with capitalism and this meme becomes accurate.
The US has a higher per capita rate of both food insecurity and extreme poverty than China, Cuba, Vietnam, and the former USSR.
1 out of every 7 US citizens needs to visit food banks to survive, despite having enough food to feed 10 billion people. Half of all food produced is thrown away by retailers.
In the US alone, 20-40k deaths every year because of lack of health insurance / care. On average, that’s 300k over the last decade.
80% of US workers live paycheck to paycheck, 40% cannot cover a $400 emergency.
70% of US citizens say they are struggling financially. In the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic, Unemployment claims went to 6.6M in one week, compared to ~700k at the peak of the great depression. Food banks are running out of food in places like New York and Pittsburgh, and hospitals are short on ventilators needed to keep people alive. Lines outside an NY soup kitchen, May 2020. Americans turn to shoplifting food as 1 in 8 are food insecure as of late 2020.
US Life expectancy peaked in 2014, is on the decline, and is now lower than in China., 2
Meanwhile…
USSR had a more nutritious diet than the US, according to the CIA. Calories consumed surpassed the US. source. Ended famines.
Had the 2nd fastest growing economy of the 20th century after Japan. The USSR started out at the same level of economic development and population as Brazil in 1920, which makes comparisons to the US, an already industrialized country by the 1920s, even more spectacular
Free Universal Health care, and most doctors per capita in the world. 42 doctors per 10k population, vs 24 in Denmark and Sweden, 19 in US.
Had near zero unemployment, continuous economic growth for 70 straight years. The “continuous” part should make sense – the USSR was a planned, non-market economy, so market crashes á la capitalism were pretty much impossible.
USSR moved from 58.5-hour workweeks to 41.6 hour workweeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960
USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996., 2
In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67.
Many more links here: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/capitalism_doesnt_work.html
Nice try, Elon would never do something like that! The person who pioneered DRM on electric vehicle chargers being pro corporate monopoly? Noooo…
I guess the only devil’s advocate there is that to achieve higher memory bandwidths, you do actually need the RAM to be as close to the processor as possible. It’s why Apple’s M1 and M2 processors have higher real-world memory speeds than Intel processors because they moved the RAM to literally on the CPU package itself, as much as I don’t like Apple. You also have things like HBM where the RAM is just a bare silicon die right next to the processor die, with a silicon interposer underneath connecting both that can do much higher signalling rates than any circuit board.
But, to say that this validates never being able to upgrade the RAM is still a stupid argument. There are ways to have your cake and eat it too. Dell recently came up with their CAMM modules which have a physical design that places the RAM chips much closer to the processor than SODIMM slots, and there are theoretically even faster module concepts like having a socketed RAM module on the bottom of the board directly opposite to the processor. Or, you could have a compute module where maybe the processor and RAM is one piece, but you can change the CPU and RAM combo while keeping the rest of the device. Or, how about this, a compute module or CPU package with onboard high speed memory or HBM, and lower speed slots that allow for expansion? Modern memory controllers are definitely smart enough to map memory in a way where the things that are accessed the most or require the highest bandwidth would be moved to the faster memory. Individual compression sockets for modern RAM chips like we have for the CPU, like your suggestion, either on the chip itself or extremely close to it, would definitely be harder to pull off due to the much tighter tolerances of modern day memory, but definitely not impossible.
Well, fucking, said.
To add to this, is the problem of the ideals that capitalistic companies brainwash us into liking. Replaceable batteries on phones is a huge example: If you go back to the year 2002 and try to release a feature phone (pre-smart phone) that has a fucking case sealed with glue and no replaceable battery, you’d get raked over the coals for it and will absolutely get called out for your shameless cash grab of a phone. Even in 2007-2010, tons of critics of the iPhone was still, rightfully, calling out the fact that you can’t replace the battery. Samsung and plenty of other Android manufacturers famously called them out over it and boasted that their phones have replaceable batteries and therefore will last longer (which is true at least on the hardware level, the battery fails in most phones long before the other components do). Annnnnnd jump to the 2020s where every single phone has sealed in batteries, and somehow the mainstream now thinks that having a replaceable battery (as in, a back case that opens easier than Fort Knox) is somehow a sign of a low quality phone. The excuse is made that more “premium” case materials like metal and glass can’t easily be made into a form factor that can open easily (which is total BS by the way, you’re just too lazy and/or greedy to design it), or that a non-sealed case can’t be made to to be IP69 or whatever rating of waterproofness (why do you need a regular phone to withstand anything more than rain or water spills, or at the very worst accidentally dropping into a sink or bathtub and being fished right back out? Which a gasket around the removable case can absolutely do, see: cheap sport watches with replaceable batteries. If I needed to capture images of a blobfish at the bottom of the Marinara’s Trench, sure, I’ll consider a sealed device for waterproofing, otherwise fuck off.) I’d take a thicker phone made of cheap plastic that comes off more easily to reveal a battery and SD card slot over a “premium” feeling phone any day (for that I have a Fairphone, which is great), but apparently I’m in the minority now. And it’s not like 90% of people don’t put a case on their phone and cover up whatever it’s made of anyway. Yeah, you can really feel that chamfered unobtanium edge and mythril back plate through that plastic and rubber OtterBox!
Same with soldered CPUs in computers. There was a time where even laptop CPUs were socketed. This made the laptops a little thicker but WAY more upgradable. Now, neither Intel nor AMD even make non-BGA (that’s the style of soldering for large chips) mobile CPUs anymore, and there is increasing push to solder even desktop CPUs to the motherboard, starting with small form factor, embedded, and special purpose motherboards but absolutely inevitably spreading to that minifridge sized gaming PC of yours that literally has no excuse to not have a socket, and yet, I guarantee you they’ll think of some excuse to do it and the techbro influencers will convince everyone that this is the best way.
Oh, so literally the most first world of first world problems.
I’ve SSH’d into a web server and fixed something while on a crowded bus using my phone and the cloud hosting provider’s shitty browser-based terminal emulator, searching shit up on Stack Exchange and all. The hardest part of that was getting the cloud provider to let me in while I was away from my home IP address and the computer I normally use. I think you got this Ms. IT consultant who probably doesn’t even know a single CLI command.
Ok, as someone who’s somewhat worked in and keeps up with the IT industry, not a consultant but as the guy actually managing the servers and shit: If a single team member being behind on two hours of work will ruin everything, in a deployment big enough to need a consultant who flies first class, your tech stack is already screwed beyond help. Especially in large enterprise scales, you build in automatic redundancy, failover, and backups for a reason, it’s so the computers can buy themselves enough time till a human can come in and sort it out, even if the humans are running late like humans often are. Maybe you should consult the owners on making their IT deployment more resilient.
Or, if you’re pushing the work off till literally as you’re flying to your destination, that’s on you, not the babies in your vicinity.
Oh look! Once again mentioning the Paris Agreement and climate change and sustainability and making it seem like it’s the sole responsibility of the commoners and not aristocracy! Hey, Vogue, news flash: Joe Cashier or Jane Officeworker owning an extra shirt or two isn’t what’s pushing the Earth ove…
Similarly, XML bombs exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs_attack
Presumably any markup language that allows recursive variables/definitions is vulrnable to this. Hell some markup languages are full-on Turing complete (Wiki pages for example) and therefore can be used to make honest to god infinite loops or maybe even directly run general purpose malicious code on a server.
Also, the notion that good service gets you good tips has been thoroughly debunked by numerous studies. Corrected for other factors, the amount you get for tips is essentially random and not at all correlated with service quality. And not corrected for other factors like the real world is? Tips are correlated with your ethnicity, gender, dress, makeup and hair style, and how attractive you look in general. So not to be melodramatic, but tipping is literally the enablement of systematic discrimination.
Isn’t this from a movie?