Hablamos en Español si lo prefieres, campeón. De verdad que es la actitud más imbécil posible asumir que cualquiera que te contradice es un astroturfer

Vindo de alguem que acusa aqueles que duvidam de inquéritos que mostram 90%+ de taxa de aprovação do governo num país de “Partido único” de serem “ocidentais com o cérebro lavado pela propaganda ocidental” é uma ironia de ir para o Livro de Recordes do Guiness.

Se fores mesmo Espanhol, sugiro que fales com pessoas que viveram no tempo do Franco para veres como as coisas funcionam em sistemas onde o Estado controla a informação e tem poder arbitrário.

Alternativamente, vai trabalhar para grandes empresas durante uma décade ou duas e aprende como é que os jogos de poder e a pressão funcionam até mesmo em ambientes muito mais pequenos que um país: as pessoas quando já são crescidinhos e têm de se preocupar com por comida na boca dos filhos absolutamente não dizem certas coisas abertamente se pensam que estão a ser vigiadas e podem sofrer consequencias por isso.

Não leves a mal mas tu soas como alguns dos jovens no pequeno partido de Esquerda de que sou membro no meu país - ignorante e com uma visão simplística do mundo e da política.

I very much doubt it’s an authoritarian nightmare (that would be North Korea or China back in the days of Mao).

China does however have a system of “social points”, so people are well aware that if they don’t do and say the right things, it might negativelly impact their lives (you don’t set up such a system for anything other than push people to behave in certain ways).

Further, only an idiot would deny that during about 3 decades (though that was mainly over about a decade ago) China has pulled up from poverty more people than the rest of the World combined, by a huge margin, even while in the West social mobility went into reverse and inequality started growing (especially after 2008).

Equally only an idiot would deny that in a single party system being openly critical of the Party is likely to have negatives consequences for that person and even the mere concern that it might happen will make people just say nothing, just in case. (I mean, shit, people will naturally just do this at work in supposedly free countries with work-at-will legislation were they can just be fired for no reason, so it takes quite a lot of naivety to think people will not “keep their mouths shut, just in case” when it’s actual authorities with no independent oversight over them keeping a keen eye on a persons sayings and doings, as they have the power to fuck your life up far more than merelly firing you).

Finally, it takes are a very (very, VERY) special kind of idiot to think that there are only two ways to govern a country and if you’re critical of one of them, then you must be a brainwashed tribalist supporting the “other” one. There is no bigger kind of political moron because the very mental architecture the use to judge things hyper-simplistic and ultra reductive.

If people’s life was amazing, the authorities there wouldn’t need a Great Firewal of China, a social points system or a giant civil society surveillance system, just like in the supposedly free West you see the increase in civil society surveillance and the Propaganda machine (around here using immigrants and even people with non-normative sexuality as scapegoats) going into overdrive, all coinciding (by “an amazing coincidence”) with the time when quality of life stopped improving and started going down and the first generation in a century who is expected the have a worse life than their parents started coming of age.

(Against, this kind of shit should be familiar to Spaniards, at least those who were adults during the days of Franco, because very similar tools were used).

Those kind of mechanisms aren’t deployed against a people which supports by 90%+ the current government, and they’re generic rather than a China-only thing and some are just as much used in supposed Democracies as in Autocracies - similar techniques, just with different excuses justifying their use.

Whilst the country is not an absolute dictatorship, Chinese “we love the Party” data is highly poluted by a “it’s best not to say certain things, just in case” concern, information control and internal Propaganda in a similar way to, say, the public opinion in Hungary is shaped by that regime’s control of the Press and a certain insecurity so if you work for the State over there you won’t be critical of Orban and his party because that’s just not good for your career (and a similar thing happens in, for example, Turkey) so their data on it is going to be highly poluted (unsurprisingly, if you personally know people form those countries, its the more well informed people who think worse of the government, hence typically even with all the information control and even iron first, they have worst polling in the larger cities)

What shocks me is that somebody supposedly from a country which had a dictatorship until 75 can’t recognize certain kinds of mechanisms which I’m pretty sure their parents or grandparents are familiar with and their impact.

That doesn’t mean that most people in China aren’t content, what it does mean is that poll data showing a 90%+ stated approval of the government must be taken with a large pinch of salt.

I happen to live next door to Spain, in Portugal, and I did ask my parents and older friends (some of which who are very leftwing and were Communists back in the days of the Revolution) and back then in our own Fascism (which ran parallel to Spain’s) nobody would tell their true opinion about the government to a stranger, much less a stranger claiming to be doing a poll for some university in a country which is viewed and views itself as an adversary of your own country.

Hell, in such a setup people would loudly tell the foreigner (or local working for those foreigners) just how great their government was just in case that was some kind of sting operation by the secret police or what you said leaked out: back when even your neighbours could rat you out to the secret police for saying something critical of the regime, criticizing the regime to somebody claiming to be doing a “poll” like this was a good way to end up a political prisioner (and, unlike those hailing from the middle class, politicial prisioners from poorer families didn’t get the velvet glove treatment, and most people were poor and working class).

So, it’s strange you didn’t ask such things from older people in the country you claim to hail from…

That and given how you phrased…

You, as a westerner, believe your western propaganda that China is an antidemocratic autocracy where people can’t give their political opinions freely. Chinese people simply don’t feel that way as per any serious study, and your opinion can be safely ignored because it’s based on your misunderstandings as a misled westerner.

all sounds a lot like you’re not a Spaniard. Which would make your earlier statement:

As a Spaniard, it’s hard to conceive 90+% of the population being satisfied with the central government

a lie.

Guess who would try and pass themselves as a “westerner” to seem more trustworthy in a forum mostly frequented by “westerners” when defending China?

A propaganda astroturfer.

(Funilly enough, there’s a ton of anti-China propaganda in the West, especially in the US, it’s just that this time you seriously overplayed that as a card when you tried to whitewash your own propaganda with it)

PS: Oh and just to point out how much that “westerner bias” bollocks applies to me, just after I made that previous comment on your bullshit, I made an equally critical comment on some other muppet from the “other” side talking about “China’s attrocities”, and that comment of mine definitelly sounds like pro-China to any simpleton tribalist moron or propaganda sockpuppet.

My biggest “bias” in this is against Hipocrisy and Propaganda.

In a field of shit, pointing at a specific turd and shouting “Look at that shit” is at best redundant, at worst sleazy propagandistic and hipocrite bollocks.

China’s present day level of support for atrocity is nothing compared with most of the West’s active support (diplomatic, economic and even with weapons) for the the present day equivalent of the Nazis committing a Genocide in Gaza.

Even what Russia is doing in Ukraine (with the support of China) is nowhere close to that shit if measured in terms of civilian casualties as a percentage of the population (even if including military casualties, it’s still well below the levels of bloodshed in Gaza).

We would need to go back to the time of Mao to find China supporting atrocities at such a level.

That “atrocities” flag is best waved from the top of the moral high ground, not from the top of a pile of Palestinian children’s bones.

Yeah, oil used to be the cheapest energy source for most situations (with the notable exception of mass power generation, were coal - an environmental even worse fossil fuel - was cheaper), but over the last couple of decades due to pressure on both the supply side (the easilly and cheaply extractable stuff gone) and from competing energy sources (like solar and wind-generation) oil stopped being one of the cheapest energy sources and it was pushed into just those uses were its high energy density gave it an advantage (i.e. transportation).

With better battery technology even that advantage is being lost (so electric cars are becoming the standard), which leaves only some chemical synthesis processes as places were oil is the best option.

Coal was kind pushed out of most of its markets long ago (hence you don’t see that many steam trains around) so it is mainly used in power generation, and the falling cost of solar is making coal uncompetitive in it.

Gas is a little behind oil, with its main uses being domestic heating and cooking - now transiting to electric - and power generation - where renewables are now cheaper.

The trend for fossil fuels has been obvious for decades but there is naturally a TON of inertia in the pricing changes actually resulting in the needed infrastructure changes to transition away from them plus the Economic interests which extract rents in those areas are very literally paying politicians to delay this change as much as possible hence phenomenons like many more rightwing political parties pushing anti-renewables policies.

How about this: “a functioning market economy” is only possibly with strong overshight of a greater authority than “the Market”, which puts the interests of citizens above the interests of businesses.

If left to their own devices the Free Market only ever exists in low barriers to entry and low economies of scale markets, like teddy bears or soap, not in markets were it’s much harder for new entrants and being bigger is always better - and energy generation until recently was very capital intensive and required big power plants or dams located in very specific places so was not a flat-playing-field size-agnostic market and tended towards monopolies and cartels.

Even nowadays with solar, even in those countries were personal generation is viable unless governments have intervened and force it to be otherwise there are barriers for individuals and small companies to sell their self-generated power (for example were I live they get 1/4 of the price selling than they do buying), which are a mix of cost barriers to entry (the cost of a proper converter on top of the cost of the additional panels if you want to go beyond self-consumption), financial structures dominated by and best suited for large companies (mainly the wholesale and consumer markets being separate, with the large companies sitting in the middle and extracting rents from being an intermediary) and even regulatory barriers to entry (the product of governments activelly legislating and regulating to benefit the large energy companies).

Also to add to what you wrote, another reason is that their North Sea oil reserves became pretty much depleted in the last decade or two with gas following it, which has pushed gas prices higher and hence pushed people to user more electricity (gas prices in Britain were famously low) and along with exporting all industry to places like China and Bangladesh that has naturally brought down Britain’s direct CO2 emissions.

Yet another reason is that the Crown makes money from licensing space for offshore wind farms since they’re the ones who officially own the seabed around Britain.

I used to live as an immigrant in Britain and, still today, it still never ceases to amaze me how so many of them keep falling for the “Britain is leading…” bullshit they’re constantly fed by the media and politicians over there, not just in this but in pretty much everything (Brexit didn’t happen in a vacuum).

Even my shitty shit country - Portugal - has long been beating Britain in this (as it’s a much poorer country, badly managed and with lots of problems) purelly because even in the time of Salazar (the Fascist dictator) there was a lot of investment in Hydro-generation, which continued after the Revolution in 74 and expanded into Wind-generation (actual in-shore wind, because unlike in Britain the NIMBYs don’t have the power to just push it to be the much more expensive offshore kind) and later Solar, so whilst Britain was mismanaging their North Sea reserves and burning oil and gas like there’s no tomorrow (part of the reason why Norway has a massive sovereign fund and the UK does not - the Norwegians didn’t just burn it like crazy and wasted the money of whatever was sold) my country was already generating a lot of its power from hydro and it just became more so since.

Shitty shit Portugal is now in the 75%+ bracket on renewables.

The idea that Britain is leading anybody in renewables adoption is hilariously wrong.

As a Spaniard, you should ask your parents and/or grandparents if in Franco’s day they would really tell their real opinions about their government to some random person doing a poll.

Government satisfaction data in an autocracy is always going to be poluted because people fear their words might reach the ears of somebody in a position of authority and them being punished in some way for being critical of the government, so they keep it to themselves and share it at most with family and close friends.

(And this is before we even count the effects from people’s main information sources being highly controlled in such regimes, so literally they might think other countries are shitholes compared to theirs because that’s what newspapes and TV tell them. Even though people are quite a lot more cynical about the “news” in such regimes - one of the Soviet times jokes was “There is no pravda [truth] in the Pravda [the newspaper], there is no izvestia [news] in the Izvestia [another newspaper]” - such total control in aggregate still pushes public opinion to be better than otherwise).

People have no such need to keep their mouth shut in Democracies. Further, I would even say that in Democracies people are incentivised to be loudly critical - those who support a different political party than the one in power tend to be loudly critical purelly out of tribalism, same as they would criticize the other team in a footbal match even if that team was playing well.

All this to say that we don’t really know how much people in China are satisfied or not with the authorities there because smart people living in a autocratic regime know better than to voice criticism of those in power, which polutes the data, whilst in Democracies political clubism also probably polutes the data but in the opposite direction.

Not to mention that in certain countries they could also get better public services if they didn’t need to spend money on a military sized for power projection into the Middle East …

The way one designs hardware in is to optimize for the most common usage scenario with enough capacity to account for the peak use scenario (and with some safety margin on top).

(In the case of silent power sources they would also include lower power leakage in the common usage scenario so as to reduce the need for fans, plus in the actual physical circuit design would also include things like airflow and having space for a large slower fan since those are more silent)

However specifically for power sources, if you want to handle more power you have to for example use larger capacitors and switching MOSFETs so that it can handle more current, and those have more leakage hence more baseline losses. Mind you, using more expensive components one can get higher power stuff with less leakage, but that’s not going to happen outside specialist power supplies which are specifically designed for high-peak use AND low baseline power consumption, and I’m not even sure if there’s a genuine use case for such a design that justifies paying the extra cost for high-power low-leakage components.

In summary, whilst theoretically one can design a high-power low-leakage power source, it’s going to cost a lot more because you need better components, and that’s not going to be a generic desktop PC power source.

That said, I since silent PC power sources are designed to produce less heat, which means have less leakage (as power leakage is literally the power turning to heat), even if the with the design having been targetted for the most common usage scenario of that power source (which is not going to be 15W) that would still probably mean better components hence lower baseline leakage, hence they should waste less power if that desktop is repurposed as a NAS. Still won’t beat a dedicated ARM SBC (not even close), but it might end up cheap enough to be worth it if you already have that PC with a silent power source.

When I had my setup with an ASUS EEE PC I had mobile external HDDs plugged to it via USB.

Since my use case was long-term storage and feeding video files to a Media TV Box, the bandwidth limit of USB 2.0 and using HDDs rather than SDDs was fine. Also back then I had 100Mbps ethernet so that too limited bandwidth.

Even in my current setup where I use a Mini-PC to do the same, I still have the storage be external mobile HDDs and now badwidth limits are 1Gbps ethernet and USB 3.0, which is still fine for my use case.

Because my use case now is long term storage, home file sharing and torrenting, my home network is using the same principles as distributed systems and modern microprocessor architectures: smaller faster data stores with often used data close to were its used (for example fast smaller SDDs with the OS and game executables inside my gaming machine, plus a torrent server inside that same Mini-PC using its internal SDD) and then layered outwards with decreasing speed and increasing size (that same desktop machine has an internal “storage” HDD filled with low use files, and one network hop from it there’s the Mini-PC NAS sharing its external HDDs containing longer term storage files).

The whole thing tries to balance storage costs and with usage needs.

I suppose I could improve performance a bit more by setting up some of the space in the internal SDD in the Mini-PC as a read/write cache for the external HDDs, but so far I haven’t had the patience to do it.

I used to design high performance distributed computing systems and funnilly enough my home setup follows the same design principles (which I had not noticed until thinking about it now as I wrote this).

Yeah, different hardware is designed for different use cases and generally won’t work as well for other use cases, which is also why desktops seldom make for great NAS servers (their fans will also fail from constant use, plus their design spec is for much higher power usage so they have a lot more power waste even if trottled down).

That said my ASUS EEE PC lasted a few years on top of a cabinet in my kitchen (which is were the Internet came into my house so the router was also there) with a couple of external HDDs plugged in, and that’s a bit of a hostile environment (because some of the particulates from cooking, including fat, don’t get pulled out and end up accumulating there).

At the moment I just have a Mini-PC on my living room with a couple of external HDDs plugged in that works as NAS, TV Media Box and home server (including wireguard VPN on top of a 1Gbps connection, which at peak is somewhat processor intensive). It’s an N100 and the whole thing has a TDP of 15W so the fan seldom activates. So far that seems to be the best long term solution, plus it’s multiple use unlike a proprietary NAS. It’s the some of the best €140 (not including the HDDs) I’ve ever spent.

Stuff designed for much higher peek usage tend to have a lot more waste.

For example, a 400W power source (which is what’s probably in the original PC of your example) will waste more power than a lower wattage on (unless it’s a very expensive one), so in that example of yours it should be replaced by something much smaller.

Even beyond that, everything in there - another example, the motherboard - will have a lot more power leakage than something designed for a low power system (say, an ARM SBC).

Unless it’s a notebook, that old PC will always consume more power than, say, an N100 Mini-PC, much less an ARM based one.

True for notebooks. (For years my home NAS was an old Asus EEE PC)

Desktops, on the other hand, tend to consume a lot more power (how bad it is, depends on the generation) - they’re simply not designed to be a quiet device sitting on a corner continuously running a low CPU power demanding task: stuff designed for a lot more demanding tasks will have things like much bigger power sources which are less efficient at low power demand (when something is design to put out 400W, wasting 5 or 10W is no big deal, when it’s designed to put out 15W, wasting 5 or 10W would make it horribly inefficient).

Meanwhile the typical NAS out there is running an ARM processor (which are known for their low power consumption) or at worse a low powered Intel processor such as the N100.

Mind you, the idea of running you own NAS software is great (one can do way more with that than with a proprietary NAS, since its far more flexible) as long as you put it in the right hardware for the job.

The EU has no digital dependency on corporate AI, which seems to be the biggest beneficiary of unwinding the GDPR and other personal-info protecting legislation.

I partly agree with the point you’re making but I don’t think it actually applies that much to weakening this specific legislation.

Further, your point doesn’t negate the Corruption - nothing impedes both things happening at once and in fact Corruption explains the current digital dependency, which for example was made worse by EU decisions such as treating the US as a safe haven nation for the data of EU citizens even though already then the Snowden Revelations as well as US’ very own legislation made it very clear that the US was not safe for any data stored there or in the hands of US companies since their authorities could secretly force companies there to give them access to that data.

We are in the hole we are in part because over the years people in positions of power in the EU were “friendly” to and “understanding of the concerns” of large US Tech companies and “by an amazing coincidence” were latter given millionaire “jobs” with those companies - EU policy in the digital domain was shaped by something other than the interests if EU citizens or even EU businesses and, last I checked, US companies were not the ones EU politicians were elected to represent.

Last but not least, further caving to the US will just dig that hole even further, making us even more susceptible in the future to such blackmailing - it is literally the very opposite of the direction when should be going to.

As I see it, the EU is a 470 million people market which could seriously fuck up US tech companies doing things like cutting the accounts of judges in the EU which weren’t nice to them, and do so by using already existing regulatory tools (for example, launching investigations on them for non-compliance with several EU regulations), which could go all the way to huge penalties and even blocking their access to the EU market (which is huge and represents a massive chunk of their profits). There simply isn’t a will to do so and I fully believe that lack of will is related to personal upside maximization of people in positions of power in the EU since, as you describe, they’re already attacking the Judiciary in the EU.

Frankly the only explanation I see for these measures which isn’t either some form of corruption or massive incompetence, would be if this was just one big smoke and mirrors show to delay actions by the current US administration with no actual intention of ultimately doing anything meaningful, all to give time within the EU to move to alternatives which are not dependent on the US and/or for the evolution of events (for example, the AI bubble crashing) to make the whole thing irrelevant. Even then, this doesn’t provide a positive explanation for the strange unwillingness of EU regulators to deploy the big guns when the US attacks members of the Judiciary in the EU as you describe, and for the various measures taken in the past at the EU level which have helped create and deepen the current digital dependency.

It’s called Corruption.

If this goes through, watch out in a couple of years for ex-commisioners being paid fortunes by large Tech companies as non-executive board members, giving speeches or consulting gigs.

It’s the same way as in the US, were people in positions of power doing “favours” today for large companies “by an amazing coincidence” later end up being paid enormous fortunes by those very companies or related companies for “working” 1h/month or similar - at that level the exchange of political favours for money is not done using brown envelopes full of bank notes.

Investigation and Prosecution of Corruption in Europe are a joke whilst Conflict Of Interest legislation is non-existent or riddled with so many giant loopholes that it’s actually worse than if it didn’t exists as it deceives most people into believing these things are properly legislated for.

We live in a seriously corrupt era in Europe, even in the countries which were traditionally cleaner.

Fair enough - I don’t really know what are the numbers of Jewish People who already lived in the territory of Palestine that was became Israel at the time of the formation of that country.

This info is all I found some time ago because I was curious.

I knew that a lot of people from Russia had emigrated to Israel but the actual number was very surprising when I found out.

But yeah, either way we both agree on the core point which is that a large majority of Israelis are not descendants from people affected by the Holocaust.

Source (at the Jewish Virtual Library)

Maybe you should tell them they’re “factually wrong”.

because nearly 100 years ago someone else did it to their people and now they’re saying “it’s our turn.”

Not even close.

Most Israelis by a large margin are descendants of people who came from Russia, not Western Europe.

Most Israelis by a large margin are either descendants of people who came from Russia, or already lived in the territory of Palestine when Israel was formed, not descendants of people from Western Europe.

Only a small fraction of Israelis are descendants of people affected by the Holocaust, much less of Holocaust survivors.

There is no such thing as a “Jewish Hive Mind” and the only thing these Jews share with the Jews who were victims of the Holocaust is having the same religion, nothing else - not principles, not ethics, not morals, not empathy with victims of extreme racism, not even most of their culture: just because somebody also uses a kippah doesn’t mean the think like you.

The Holocaust in Israel is nothing more than a tool used by the present day Nazi-like ideology that runs that place to induce collective fear amongst Jews because it’s much more easy to spread extreme racist hate amongst people who live in fear because of their ethnicity.

This explains why, rather than learning from the Holocaust to empathise with the victims of such things (which would be a natural thing for the descendants of the victims of the Holocaust to learn from the experiences of their parents and grandparents), most people in Israel have instead learned extreme racist hate for those who don’t look like them and who stand in the way of what they are told “is necessary make Jews safe”.

The way the memory of the Holocaust is used in Israel is a complete total shit show of Racism and Propaganda that has massivelly distorted the real thing to serve the objectives of the Nazi-like ideology which is Zionism.

I think that if you look around (just look at things like ChatControl, ICE in the US and the support for the Genocidal White Colonialist state of Israel in most of the West) we in the “developed” West are fast moving backwards and becoming more like Russia - more surveillance, more authoritarianist use of force, more corruption, more racism, more imperialism, a more oligarchic economic system, more concentration of power, more inequality.

Even in a perfect World were common Russians accepted it with open arms, I’m not so sure an occupation of Russia by Western nations would ultimatelly end in them “developing” towards Western Standards rather than in Western nations finishing regressing towards Russian Standards.