The massive financial crash that will wipeout those assholes might the only real “win” the rest of us get.

Of course, judging by the last one in 2008 (which, IMHO, I suspect will turn out to be smaller than the AI one), governments the world over will try to save the assholes and make the rest of us pay for it with Austerity - if there’s one thing I’ve learned from living through a couple of major crashes (in the very industries most hard hit) and several minor ones is that when those in power see that they can rescue the wealthy whilst making the rest pay with no consequences for themselves, they’ll do it again and again in ever more extreme ways, until things at a societal level rather than just crack, actually blow up.

We shall see - there is really no way the rest of us can stop the desperate feeding frenzy amongst the increasingly panicked elites and their politician minions before the whole thing crashes from the systemic accumulation of inbalances, so no matter what we (the common folk) do, we’re going to get a massive AI crash - probably as big as the Net Crash and the 2008 Crash together - the more the feeding freenzy lasts (and governments as usual are activelly trying to delay the day of reckoning, hence making the feeding frenzy last longer and hit deeper) and the more of the broader Economy the sharks can reach, the worse it will be.

I’m still perfectly fine in my 6+ years old Gaming PC with 16GB.

But then again I switched from Windows to Linux about 2 years ago.

Since the time I started using PCs (over 3 decades ago), I went down the route of squeezing as much as I could from my desktop PCs by upgrading the hardware piece by piece rather than periodically buying a new one - to the point that I think I’ve done maybe just 3 full replacements in those 3 decades - the upgrades most of the time being memory, graphics cards and storage upgrades as those tend to be the best bang for the buck, though a few times all the way to replacing the motherboard (which sometimes forces things like memory upgrades and once even a computer box and power source upgrade, in the transition to ATX physical format).

All this to say that in the last few years since Windows has become so bloated and inneficient, Linux’s capabilities to run Windows software have become so good and the prices of the usually best value hardware upgrades (memory, graphics cards) have become so high that, in my (I believe informed) view, the best performance upgrade for one’s PC right now for most people is literally to replace Windows with Linux.

This isn’t fanboyism speaking - I’ve been using Linux for fun since the early 90s when I would install Slackware from floppy disks, professionally for a large part of my career (which was developing software for the server side, were Linux became dominant in the 00s) and only switched my Gaming PC to it 2 years ago because I before I didn’t feel it wasn’t at all hassle free to game in Linux and I didn’t want to come how to unwind from spending all day programming and doing bug-fixing just to be stuck at diagnosing problems running some game or other in Linux - this is genuinelly my analysis based on my experience of improving my PC almost always by targetted upgrading piece by piece to improve performance rather than regularly buying new machines.

In fact, I’ve done this upgrade not just for myself but also for a family member whose Windows 8 (!) PC had become incompatible with pretty much everything the used - put Linux in, put up the desktop shortcuts for them to get to what they use (browser, e-mail), configure the thing to auto-update and it’s problem solved.

The ones I worked with in The Netherlands and Britain didn’t seem to be a problem.

Maybe America attracts a certain kind of white South African more than those countries?!

If I’m not mistaken, in the US there are money flows at the Federal level from the stronger economies to the weaker ones.

There is no such thing in the EU beyond the “structural funds” which countries with weaker economies receive when they join but which stop after a while (and which both Portugal and Greece wasted in roads and corruption).

So those two situations are not the same, they’re only partially similar.

Nah, that came from being hogtied by the Euro.

Both Portugal and Greece used to “solve” (temporarily, of course) such problem when they had their own currencies by changing the interest rates to essentially inflate away the excess debt, something that they can’t do in the Euro.

In fact, if you look at for example the history of GDP Growth in Portugal, you see a huge increase in growth after the 1974 revolution (which replaced Fascism with Democracy), then another increase when the country joined the EU and then a steep decrease down to levels barely above those during Fascism when the Euro came to be.

Those countries gave away their control over their monetary policy and thus when push came to shove the big countries fucked them up spare large banks from those countries having to suffer the consequences of lending money at stupidly low interest rates to countries whose economies and economic and fiscal policies did not justify it.

It was the home of the braves.

Then the white man came and killed them all.

Brexit did not just pop-up into existence fully formed, done in a jiffy, and immediately afterwards British society returning to its otherwise eternal blissful state of everybody being perfectly just and fair.

From my own experience living in Britain as an EU immigrant before Brexit, it is my impression that said kind of people you mention aren’t at all a small minority, possibly aren’t even a minority.

Further, even most of the “thinking” types have to a lesser or greater extent fallen prey to the soft Jingoism relentlessly pushed by pretty much all of the Press in Britain, were the “Great” in Great Britain isn’t part of the name of one of the British Isles but rather it describes the quality of the British Society, British People, British Politics and pretty much everything else British.

I mean, all it takes is to compare the portrayal of international gatherings in, say the BBC, with the portrayal of the same in the news of other countries, and invariably the thing is passed by the BBC as British politicians being given lots of attention and treated as important by the rest, which does not at all match what’s reported in the press outside Britain.

And don’t get me started on how even supposedly left-of-center newspapers in Britain publish opinion articles about the “scandal” of people sexually behaving in ways that are not the norm, which are incredibly similar to the anti-homosexuality tropes of a few decades ago (only it’s not fashionable to be a sexual moralist against homosexuals anymore, so now different victims are chosen).

From my experience, prejudice in British society is totally normalized, at a level well beyond what I’ve seen in other countries in Europe I lived in - which is why IMHO it’s so easy for anti-immigration scare stories to flare up and for things like transphobia to rise to the surface and grow.

What you describe is not at all my experience in Europe (mainly UK and Portugal, plus a bit Germany).

Small tills with not enough room for a big shopping, pushy and badly designed software, the whole “check your age” for alcohol with a single employee handling 20+ self-checkout tills, the thing bitching and moaning if you bring your own bag, different quirks for self-checkout tills in different stores, not taking cash payments and so on, are incredibly common and what’s rare is the ones which work smoothly.

I mean, I would love those schemes some people describe (in Scandinavia?) were you basically check things in as you pick them up, but I have yet to see anything like that myself in the countries I lived in during the self-checkout era.

So far all I’ve seen in Europe are shit cheap implementations which only ever beat the manual checkout in speed if all you have is a handful of things (so, not a weekly shopping) or the store itself purposefully closed pretty much all manual tills and caused huge queues in order to push people to use self-checkout.

PS: By the way, in my experience in Europe, it’s always you that pack your own bags, which actually makes the manual checkout even faster since at the same time the cashier is doing the checkout you’re doing the bagging, so the whole thing can go twice as fast whilst in a self-checkout it’s only one person doing both.

What crossing his legs?

He’s literally fidgeting with his feet and pretty much stammering whilst saying that AI has created more jobs.

I’m actually surprised a guy with the experience he must have in public speech isn’t good at hiding discomfort.

From his body language (look at his feet) and speech patterns it sure feels like he’s just lying his ass off.

Not only that - wiretaps have Judicial Oversight in that they require a Court Order (well, in most of the World, not sure if that’s the case in present day America) which a Judge supposedly only issues if there’s reason to suspect the person whose lines are tapped of committing or preparing to commit a crime, whilst Antrophic’s surveillance of people’s conversations with their chatbot has no Judicial Oversight at all and has no minimum legal threshold that must be reached before it is allowed to happen.

Yeah, I had a similar experience getting my Orange Pi 5 Pro to just allow me access to I2C (though once you figure it out, it’s a lot easier to also get stuff like GPIO, SPI and so on to work).

In fact that’s the general problem with the chinese SBCs compared to the Raspberry Pi devices - their support software, documentation and general support out there on the Internet from other users is a much weaker, at least in English - to get that stuff to work I actually on my Orange Pi I actually had to get an Ubuntu for Rockchip and then figure out how to manually add a device tree overlay with the required devices enabled whilst I believe the Raspberry Pi just has a utility that does it for you.

HOWEVER, the user who had asked for advice higher in this thread only seems to care about hosting, for which you just need “normal” Linux functionality not the embedded side of things, in which case those things work just fine even with just ARMbian - as far as I can tell all those manufactures do make available a Linux distro for their devices which supports the built-in peripherals (most relevant for hosting, wi-fi and when present ethernet) and does the normal things a desktop Linux does. That said, they quickly stop pushing out updates to it, which might be a problem.

This is why I mentioned Orange Pi and in another response suggested general Chinese SBCs - if all you need if run-of-the-mill Linux server functionality in a cheap platform, those probably suffice.

I just checked and at least the Orange Pi ones are maybe 50% up in price.

It’s almost as if they’re trying to sell as much as possible now, at what is likely to be the peak price for a long while …

Buy now! Quickly! Things will only get worse if you wait! I’m telling you this because I’m such a nice guy!

– Salesman

When was the last time you saw a French flag on a mug or a pair of shorts? Or a Dutch flag, or even a Spanish flag?

The flag in Britain gets pushed into a lot of areas to were the flags of other European countries don’t get pushed to.

My own impression (having lived for over a decade in Britain) is that the flag in Britain gets shown a lot more outside formal occasions than the national flags in other European countries. This also dovetails with the nationalistic push in the discourse of mainstream politicians and even how British news vs International news are reported in Britain (trying to make it sound like in international events everybody is paying attention and following what British politicians say or reporting on some meaningless blunder in some small provincial place elsewhere in Europe in a “look at those silly foreigners, this would never happen here” tone that implies “we’re much better than that”).

And don’t get me started on how, almost a century later, at least every 5 years there’s yet another film about WWII coming out from Britain.

The push for Nationalism and for the belief in National Greatness is much higher and widespread in Britain that anywhere else in Europe I lived in (which, by the way, includes Germany), something which is partly behind Brexit and the shit show it became because British Politicians went to negotiate the Exit Treaty with a “they’ll give us everything we want because we’re so important”.

The whole thing in Britain with the Empire and WWII reminds me how during the time of the Fascist dictator Salazar in my native Portugal there was an almost constant remembering and celebrating the past glories of the country (even though the Age Of Maritime Discoveries was 5 centuries past) which is not at all the case nowadays under Democracy.

As for the far-right and football hooligans in Britain, they’re so extreme in their flag shagging that the ones in England will not only do it with the British flag, they’ll even do it with the St. George’s.

The Far-Right in Europe are having to portray people coming over her as bad for people living here to get support.

There is little or no public support in most of Europe, even amongst the Far-Right, for projecting European power abroad by attacking foreign countries.

Also you don’t hear the Far-Right in Europe celebrating colonialism and demanding to go back to that. The few times some tried it just fell flat and they shut up about it (and as a side note, curiously the same happened when they tried American-style mixing of Religion with Politics)

Even the support for white supremacism abroad (in the form of Israel) is happening against the desires of the European public opinion and is definitelly not overtly about “our fellow whites” (and for those with any doubt that Isreal is a white supremacist nation, just go read how they treat black Jews over there according even to newspapers like the Haaretz)

Whilst the direction of travel in politics is the same in Europe and the US, the public opinion Europe is decades “behind” the American mindset in areas such as supremacism and warmongering.

It is very easy for those who know Portuguese to learn Spanish and vice-versa because the grammar is the same and most words are the same.

However the spoken Portuguese from Portugal has a very strong accent (which makes it sound almost like an Eastern European language for those not from EE, unlike Brasilian Portuguese) which makes it harder for Spanish-speakers to understand.

It’s probably the cheap generic.

“Proximo” (or “proxima” which is the version of the word use for females and, since in Latin languages there is no “the” and everything is either “masculine” or “feminine”, objects which are treated as “feminine”) is actually slightly tricky when translated to English because it means the “next” or “following” something in a list (hence here the doctor literally saying “Next!” in the very same way as you would in English) but it also means something that’s “near” or “close (to)” but not actually “next (to)”.

It’s one of those funny things you often find between languages in that a word in two languages means the same kind of thing (in this case related to distance between things) but the intensity/amount of the property it’s about isn’t quite the same in both languages, which can be tricky to figure out when you’re first learning a new language as what’s seemingly a simple translation turns out to have quite a bit of subtlety.