Changing from SK to CN is a trade from intentional vulnerability to unintentional vulnerability. I’ve yet to see a secure piece of software come out of China in my 30+ years of coding.
When a security analysis was done of Chinese parts of the Dutch mobile network, that was pretty much the conclusion: Chinese vendors deliver software and components full of vulnerabilities, but none of them seem to be intentional.
Since then there has been a movement to reduce Chinese vendors in general our if security concerns, as well as to improve the security posture of the mobile networks by doing things like "encrypting connections" and "switching away from telnet".
On the other hand, the Chinese managed to break into the US wiretapping system, so it's not like other networks aren't vulnerable either.
If we're talking about cheap products, then it's more likely due to cost savings rather than malice. But yeah, no one can give you defitive proof of this.
Yet in telco it is much easier and faster to get a bug fixed in Chinese equipment. IMO it is more likely you don't work with critical infrastructure than the problem being Chinese equipment.
Not only is Supermicro headquartered in USA, but it's operations are in Taiwan, which they would very much like you to acknowledge is not the same as mainland China.
Many vendor IPMI is so fiendishly hard to isolate from untrusted networks (or even networks in general) that it almost has to be an intentional backdoor.
Saying that a culture is poor at security dev, such as Chinese business culture, is not even remotely rasist.
There are many ethnicities in China, people of all genetic backgrounds. It is the culture that is the problem, not the race.
For example, there are many ethnically Chinese people who grew up in the West, working in businesses, in countries where there is a culture of security.
Now, you could label it 'culturalist', and maybe it is, but there are definitely inferior and superior cultures. Especially, there are parts of cultures which are quite comparable this way.
There's also another point that security is really fucking expensive. Apple on Google spend billions a year on security, yet their phones are broken in to once they are a couple of years old. Big American software companies have large margins and large budgets. Those Chinese companies are running on fumes (and credit.)
Security and encryption is taken as a given by Western regulators given how many times they pass laws to break encryption. If you look at targeted 0-days, the conclusion would be more along the lines of the very best hardware+software is barely secure.
>>Brother you cannot be serious with this racist take
>There are many ethnicities in China, people of all genetic backgrounds. It is the culture that is the problem, not the race.
This just seems like nitpicking to me. Colloquially most people would classify discrimination based on country of origin, or "culture" (whatever that means) as racism, even if it doesn't meet the technical definition. For instance Trump's travel bans have been called by many as "racist", even though it covers a bunch of countries, and even though the countries are majority muslim, it also excludes major muslim countries like Pakistan and Indonesia.
It's entirely fair game to criticism or even discriminate based on culture, because culture is composed of actions. If people act in such a way that you do not like, that's a valid reason not to like them.
Now, we do still need to respect cultural differences where it makes sense and consider the historical context behind cultural differences, such as colonialism.
Nazis used to measure skull dimensions to discriminate on race. How do you measure "culture" of an individual? Just apply a stereotype based on the country of origin?
Like, for example, cultures which are outwardly hostile towards women and their autonomy don’t keep that as a secret. In those places, it’s well known and obvious.
I might be sympathetic to this argument if the severity actually differed, eg. people calling mean tweets "violence" or something, but that's not what's happening there. I don't see any meaningfully difference between "I'm discriminating against you because you're Chinese" (culture/nationality) and "I'm discriminating you're Han Chinese" (ethnicity). I doubt the average racist actually knows the distinction between the two anyways, and I doubt people are going to be like "oh you're discriminating based on culture instead of ethnicity? I guess that's fine then!".
> I don't see any meaningfully difference between "I'm discriminating against you because you're Chinese" (culture/nationality) and "I'm discriminating you're Han Chinese" (ethnicity).
It's interesting you would write this as if nobody's pointed out actual cultural differences yet.
> This just seems like nitpicking to me. Colloquially most people would classify discrimination based on country of origin, or "culture" (whatever that means) as racism, even if it doesn't meet the technical definition.
Nobody is going to believe you're talking about real things if you let people call your argument "racism" so it's not nitpicking if you can explain why it's not. Also the word "discrimination" is itself a loaded term.
And yes areas having cultures is real. Sometimes it's tied to country, sometimes it's not.
> Trump's travel bans have been called by many as "racist", even though it covers a bunch of countries,
I'm confused? Covering a whole bunch of countries sharing a demographic is much more likely to be a racist move than picking one or two.
> and even though the countries are majority muslim, it also excludes major muslim countries like Pakistan and Indonesia.
That's a good argument against saying "muslim ban" but I'm pretty sure a focus on the middle east makes it more about race.
is it racist to wonder why I rarely see a chinese restaurant with inspection score above 80? culture differences are a real thing (if you don't have your head buried in the sand that is).
I've worked in many restaurants and a lot of the health scores are stacked against ethnic restaurants and how they prepare foods.
Your score gets knocked down if you have soups simmering for too long, but in Chinese cuisine it's often times common to have the broth cooking for more than 12 hours.
At a university level that's a pretty reasonable rule to have. Hell, even during exams, why confiscate? If the phone would be a means of cheating, the rule should simply be that using one is an immediate fail. That's how all my university classes did it, if it wasn't an open book exam, all phones were to be placed either screen down on the student's desk or left in their bag.
Worked perfectly fine.
I only ever had one class (which wasn't an elective) where computers and phones weren't allowed even during lectures, which was ironically an intro class on programming in C. Was a waste of time because the professor sucked and for me doubly so because I had already been using C for many years by then. Attendance was also mandatory so I just sat in the back and mostly slept through it.
He also says the pandemic didn't affect him, but honestly, whether it was Long COVID or an indirect psych effect of isolation, I've had extreme issues concentrating ever since 2020 that have been absolutely bullshit to manage.
Re: wide-scale reports of cognitive decline since lockdowns:
> In lab animals, isolation has been shown to cause brain shrinkage and the kind of brain changes you'd see in Alzheimer's disease — reduced brain cell connections and reduced levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which is important for the formation, connection, and repair of brain cells.
That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?
I'd love to see viable nuclear fusion power, but the lack of more investment at the moment doesn't really seem unreasonable. As you said, there are a number of other green alternatives, including traditional nuclear fission power, that have proven they can be real alternatives to fossil fuels and that would benefit from continued investment.
Unless I've missed something, nuclear fusion meanwhile has yet to demonstrate realistic commercial power generation, even as a proof of concept or a complete path to get to that point. In other words, more research is definitely worthwhile, but it also seems possible it will be a dead end at least in the near term. It's hard to argue prioritizing that over other things that have been generating real commercial power for decades. I'm all in favor of an all-of-the-above approach, but prioritization almost always has to be the reality.
It's an equal level of insanity that technologies like thorium breeder reactors haven't been getting whole number percentages of first world budgets, especially considering how extremely high of a priority climate change has become and how costly the alternatives (e.g., disaster mitigation) are getting.
Budgets are decided by elected officials and elected officials are steered by their polling numbers.
Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs (air travel and maritime shipping being notable exceptions). We just need to think a bit harder how to ensure this is done responsibly and safely. Not saying it is an easy problem, but I think the issue is too little resources are devoted to solving it. I would say this probably isn't harder than sending a man to the Moon. It is just something that should be possible to fix practically with existing technology and just good design.
The cost of humanity that can't decide on what needs to be done is that we are still reliant on fossil fuels and are distracting ourselves with half measures that have a lot of problems that in hindsight were pretty obvious. Like solar energy -- only works when the sun is up, is difficult to scale and we still haven't figured out how to store energy for when it is needed.
"Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs"
... what?
Criticism 1: you'd need, what, like 100 nuclear plants planned and approved? If you started now, maybe in three years you'd get like ... 10 approved. five years maybe 20-30.
Criticism 2: nuclear is not price competitive with current wind/solar installations, and CERTAINLY won't be competitive even with efficiency improvements with wind/solar in 10-20 years when any plant actually leaves the boondoggle funding phase and goes online.
Criticism 3: what design of plant? LWR/PWR/huge dome/solid fuel rod/oh shit it melts down in a natural disaster? Yeah uh, no thanks. If nuclear had gotten its act together about ... let's say 30-40 years ago and designed a reactor that:
1) meltdown proof
2) consumes almost all its fuel
3) scalable / easily replaced
Then we might be able to do it. Problem is, the entire nuclear industry was invested in solid fuel rod designs, the military loved it for the weapons isotopes, the politicos blocked funding for LFTR and other designs, the solid fuel rod reprocessors were making bank, there was probably other shadow industries like waste handlers/transporters on the dole.
So... nuclear is a no go. Solar/wind for now, use natural gas and existing nuclear for levelling until storage and solar/wind+storage drop to levels unattainable by nuclear/fusion/naturalgas/geothermal/hydro. Synthfuels for aviation. Long haul shipping can probably be done with swappable batteries and/or synthfuels. ... maybe... hydrogen if it's not the current trojan horse for hydrogen-from-methane being pushed by the oil companies.
Maybe nuclear can be competitive when solar/wind even out, and battery/storage finishes its incredible scaling and tech development. Maybe.
But the path forward is wind/solar, and maybe synthfuels and green hydrogen if the green isn't "green" like clean coal was "clean" coal.
Our children should already curse us. The science was there, and my and ESPECIALLY the boomers picked SUVs, big houses, moving to florida, and lots of cheap crap shipped 5000 miles from overseas labor over dealing with problems.
First of all, you don't wake up in the morning and have an idea that it would be great to have 5 nuclear reactors so that you don't freeze overnight. We more or less know how much energy we will need in 10 years. You just need to plan ahead.
Dams also need many years to build, but you won't say they are useless because of this...
Second, nuclear is price competitive with wind/solar. The way nuclear is competitive is because it allows removing dependency on fossil fuels and wind/solar do not. We can't afford using fossil fuels anymore because it does not matter if you get lower $/kWh if along we cause drastic climate changes.
Stop thinking in terms of $/kWh produced by the powerplant alone. To compare cost of nuclear vs solar/wind you would need to include humongous batteries that would be needed to smooth out output of solar/wind stations which nuclear powerplants do not need. We don't have the technology to build those batteries in sufficient capacity and so the price of solar/wind is currently very, very high (the price of us all cooking/freezing/suffocating/starving, etc.)
Which will be cheaper? Especially, what will be cheaper in 10 years?
Which will be online faster? As in, can be scaled out in 3-5 years?
With forthcoming 200 wh/kg LFP / LMFP, 140 wh/kg sodium ion, and various other schemes, I will heavily bet on batteries + solar / wind beating out nuclear. I don't know if you're engaging in FUD based on cobalt and nickel chemistries, or just are ignorant of the forthcoming Gotion/CATL production lines for high density LFP and sodium ion chemistries. Those aren't resource limited, they just need to build the factories, and factories are a lot better than nuclear power plants in timescale.
PLUS, storage + solar can be distributed to the home to reduce the amount the grid needs to move from a centralized generator, make the grid and homes much more resilient, and function as a backup battery store to grid storage.
I never see hydro listed on LCOE charts. I'm going to assume it's at the scale of nuclear which is already not competitive. Hydro is actually the best grid storage if you have a mountain and two big lakes or some similar setup. As I understand it, the efficiency is 90% pumping and then getting it back.
Cheap, sustainable power is in the interest of most governments that haven’t been essentially paid off to stay on fossil fuels. But because the existing tech is more invested in various political campaigns and parties across most of the world they’ll keep progress from happening in areas of public funding. From our left you’ll get the anti-nuclear zealots and from the right you’ll get the anti-government spending zealots, so it’s pretty much a political loss until fairly recently with the EU designation of nuclear as an option to support nuclear of any sort. While climate change is serious and matters it bothers me deeply when I see older nuclear facilities shutdown while new coal power plants show up the same year. It really seems like backwards progress in much of the US in our energy sector anywhere that hasn’t had massive renewables investments.
If you look more into it, it's not clear at all that fusion is actually a promising source of power. None of the currently contemplated technologies have any realistic chance of producing power anywhere near competitively in cost, even ignoring the huge research costs left to get there (no currently planned fusion experiment has any hope of producing more power than it consumes).
> follow up plant, DEMO [2], should produce electricity (750MW)
If it will ever be built and then go online. Which is highly unlikely given the slow progress of ITER and its very difficult problems - some it even does not try to solve. Like getting enough Tritium: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run...
750MW (again using thermal energy, which is probably not the future of electricity production) from such an expensive & complex device? Probably you would need pools of several fusion power plants, since it is unlikely that one fusion power plant will run for a longer periods of time. Maybe a pool of six would provide two running (just a wild guess).
The technical problems will be huge and the costs gigantic. I can't imagine how this will be competitive when in production (with outputs in tens of Gigawatts, to make any impact) in 2060 or later.
Yes, I should have said electrical power. ITER isn't even attempting to produce any. DEMO is a concept, not a planned facility; the plans will be drawn up based on the results of ITER, hopefully by 2030. Note that DEMO won't even be a particular plant, several countries participating in ITER are hoping to go on to construct DEMO plants.
I wouldn't say the (recent) past was grim, but rather that the technology to build an _affordable_ commercial device had not yet been developed yet. We designed and built ITER at such a large size and cost (€20 billion) since high temperature superconducting magnets were not yet available.
In the meantime, all of the experimental devices (JET, AUG, EAST, DIII-D, etc.,) have been gathering evidence on how to operate ITER when it is turned on, and not necessarily focused on achieving breakeven.
> We designed and built ITER at such a large size and cost (€20 billion) since high temperature superconducting magnets were not yet available.
This is one of those numbers that only seem big without context. Medium-sized cities spend more than this on interchanges and highway development over shorter timespans than any of the various multi-decade price tags that get thrown around for ITER.
Have you heard of MITs SPARC reactor? It’s way more interesting than ITER. It is 3x smaller, with Q greater than 10 (compared to ITERs ~10). It’s also slated to be finished -before- ITER.
Doesn't IETR consume more power than it produces? Fusion (like solutions for aging fission plants and their waste products) always seems just around the corner -- yet never arrives.
I hate to say it, but this is the result of fossil fuel interests running the largest [1] economy in the world. We will literally spend 1 trillion dollars a year on war in the middle east and associated commitments but couldn't bother to spend a few billion on fusion research. Absurd.
It is doubtful that fusion will even be cheaper than old-crappy-PWR-fission.
It is very very very doubtful it will beat wind/solar as they continue to drop in cost, at least not for probably... 40 years. We're looking at 10-20 years to a viable commercial design and construction.
I place fusion like next-gen fission: worthy of continued investment in research and maybe some subsidized consumer plants (if/when fusion becomes viable).
Even with viable fusion, there will likely be degradation/radioactivity of the power generation cores from fast neutrons and other problems.
On one hand, you had "traditional" companies (oil, coal, gas,...) lobbying against it, and on the other hand, you had the "green" organizations lobbying (and protesting) against it.
I’d love to see a Manhattan project for nuclear fusion research. Just pour money into it until we crack it. I think out of all the energy alternatives it’s the most game changing.
It's only top 5 most promising if you're heavily weighting based on theoretical upside. We should always be taking moonshots but for climate change and global warming we need to be taking active steps yesterday, and for that fusion shouldn't even be on the list. Fission + some renewables is all we need anyway for almost everything, and carbon capture/removal can take care of stuff that will likely need to rely on fossil fuels moving forward, like aircraft. It's not a matter of way, just will.
I agree the cost is important. I disagree in the breaking point at witch it’s “not worth it”. To me, assuming our battery tech doesn’t find a similar breakthrough before, if fusion reaches one order of magnitude above the cost of solar, it is worth it, as a backup. Better to have it and use it when there’s clouds instead of coal or gas
If you plug your solar panel into some water when you have surplus sun you get hydrogen which burns fine in a combined cycle plant.
If that's too annoying to store you can get it hot and squeeze it over some nickel to get methane.
Electrolyzation becomes cheaper than mining methane for hydrogen (and thus ammonia) production if solar hits the $0.2-0.3/Watt threshold somewhere (which is predicted to happen in 3-7 years).
It's complicated and expensive, but I'm not sure I'd bet on a sabatier reactor (or hydrogen storage if it gets cheap), an electrolyzer and 4x the solar panels being more expensive than a fusion reactor with the average output of 1 unit of solar.
Plus the sabatier thing means we don't have to upgrade all the heating furnaces and expand the grid to have 8x the capacity.
Fusion will be real handy where power density is king though. And if there's some non thermal way of getting work out of it, I can see it being cheaper.
They did say solar and battery.. So taking it literally I think they're correct that if we had a battery technology such that it provided consistent cheaper energy we wouldn't need a hypothetical nuclear backup.
No, this is way too shortsighted. Fusion allows us to use other energy sources than our own sun, which means it's essential for viable space missions, and we won't need to compete with the rest of nature (including agriculture!) for our energy needs.
Hydroponics with fusion technology allows us to produce food without relying on the sun at all. I'd say that alone is worth the investment.
DT fusion, which most of these efforts are focusing on, utterly sucks for use in space. It produces heat in materials, just like fission, except at far lower power/mass and with way more complexity.
As for the future, beamed power will work out to interstellar distances, so energy sources other than our Sun (and other stars) aren't necessarily required.
Sure. And beamed power also potentially allows one to cool a vehicle more effectively than radiating from a black body, by exploiting anti-Stokes scattering of laser light.
(From your question you might have been thinking of laser propelled light sails. These are best at speeds high enough that fusion is out of the picture.)
I totally agree in the long term for space travel. But for our current energy use, it could be useless if it costs even a little bit too much. Kind of like solar concentrators are worthless because PV got too cheap.
And fusion will never be able to stop emitting massive amounts of waste heat that must be dealt with somehow.
I'm not sure what benefit density provides, especially since people obsessed with density seem to only focus on the reaction chamber, which is the smallest part of the massive building and heat rejection apparatus that will be needed.
Rejecting waste heat is a real difficulty, and part of the reason that's France's fission fleet is at less than 50% capacity right now.
Thermal electricity production has a chance of becoming obsolete compared to direct conversion of photons into electricity. When solar plus storage costs less than steam turbines plus heat rejection, then it doesn't matter how cheap or dense the fusion part is in terms of economics.
Solar is less indirect than they. It’s like if we made our own fusion reactor and rather than using it to boil water close by to generate steam, we put the water a few miles out.
And even that, the heavy elements of the earth (basically anything heavier than Helium) only exist because of the sun's predecessor, making the heat from the core also just recycling from fusion.
One advantage of other technologies over solar is space efficiency. Obviously we're not physically lacking in space to install solar, but when even solar farms installed in the desert can be shut down by "climate activists" [1], then we really need all the help we can get
The article you linked to states this as the reason for the project being scrapped:
> But a group of residents organized as “Save Our Mesa” argued such a large installation would be an eyesore and could curtail the area’s popular recreational activities — biking, ATVs and skydiving — and deter tourists from visiting sculptor Michael Heizer’s land installation, “Double Negative.”
I also searched the page and the word 'climate' doesn't appear even once. Why do you consider this to be an example of 'climate activists' shutting down a solar farm project, and do you have any other (actual) examples of it happening?
The article mentions both "conservationists" and "endangered species advocates", who I believe tend to consider themselves (and are considered by others to be) environmentalists. Here's an example of a wing of the Nevada Democratic Party (who according to their bio, want a #GreenNewDeal) also being against the development: (edit, forgot the link: https://twitter.com/LeftCaucus/status/1374527780034015244)
For another actual example of this happening, see the scaling back of the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility
You appear to think that "conservationist", "endangered species advocate" and "environmentalist" are all synonyms for "climate activist"? Your previous comment claimed there was opposition from "climate activists", and these are not examples of that. The BattleBorn situation seems to be about about tourism and similar values (not climate activism), the Ivanpah situation looks like it's about species conservation (not climate activism).
Don't get me wrong, I am very frustrated by people who see themselves as environmentalists, for whom climate change (and thus non-carbon energy sources) is not the top priority. I think they have wrong priorities. But that doesn't mean they're hypocrites, they're just (IMO) wrong.
All that said, I agree with your topline observation that we need all the help we can get.
battery for solar installation is at the point where between 2-6hrs of capacity can be economical viable.
Maybe in a few more years/decade/s we will reach a point where in some places in the world it will be economical viable to have exclusive solar and battery, and that assuming prices will continue to drop and that there won't be any resource or physical limitations. Then we got colder climates where solar + battery is unlikely to ever become viable. Exports of solar generated green hydrogen could solve that assuming that the technology for that becomes cheap enough.
Multiple different directions where specific technologies could be economical dominant in the future.
Along with small and or very high population density nations.
India is going to end up with perhaps two billion people and will have extraordinary population density/spacing problems. They're going to desperately need huge numbers of nuclear fission power plants or fusion plants to provide for that. They will not have the space for epic scale solar farms. Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines, Vietnam, Israel, Belgium, Netherlands (among others) are in the same space vs population situation. And given the population explosion across parts of the Middle East and Africa, it's a certainty nations in those regions will have the same problem as well.
> They will not have the space for epic scale solar farms.
...space vs population situation.
Your math is totally wrong, space was never an issie for solar. It tales 100x less space for a coutry to cover it's power needs with solar, than it does for a country to grow it's own food and feed it's own people. So every country thats not a city-state, like Vatikan, is fine.
All the challaneges of Solar are around intermittency, cost and ofcourse it's less viable in northern lattitudes. But none of them are around space.
Those markets are far too small to support a nuclear industry. If solar dominates and those places are hurting for energy, the rest of the world will shrug and tell them to deal with it as best they can.
Also we are talking about totally different load over time characteristics. And we don't want time plus weather to dictate our industrial and shipping power needs.
Solar is great but not simply alone. (Latitude is less of an issue as (proper) power systems are interconnected markets that sell/buy excess load.)
Don't forget that we're perpetually one temper tantrum away from nuclear winter now, which would cripple all solar infrastructure for years. I'm actually a little surprised the DoD hasn't deeply invested in fusion for this reason alone.
I can't remember who said it but I remember reading a quote one time to the effect that the man who invented a new form of energy for the world without also inventing a new heat sink would be history's greatest monster. Not sure I agree, but does give one pause if prone to pessimism as I am.
I don't get it. Why would a new form of energy need a new heat sink?
Wouldn't any energy we can realistically generate be a drop in the bucket compared to what the Sun throws at us every second? And even if not, what would a heat sink do about it? I think I'm missing something.
no, fossil fuels aren't a new form of energy. The implication would be that a new form of energy would just be used with all the other forms of energy, it may also have been a new cheap form of energy in the quote, implying that we would take a cheap form of energy and overuse it so that the world burned faster.
Indeed, fusion has never been a certain number of years away, it's only ever been number of billions of dollars away, as projected here [1].
Though, luckily, it looks like that was a little over-pessimistic: it's not like the field has been sitting on its thumbs despite having, in terms relative to the potential, negligible funding: [2].
Even in the European Union, it is possible to pay around $5 for all the meals of a day, including not only adequate quantities of vegetables and fruits, but also a moderate amount of chicken meat.
However, for that, you must be cost-conscious, because from the same shops you could buy an equivalent quantity of food, but at a price even 10 times greater, when you choose to buy processed foods, even those as cheap as bread, instead of buying only raw ingredients.
beans, $700 / metric ton [1]
rice, $500 / metric ton [2]
a meal of 65g dry rice and 55g dry beans per person.
700m * 3 = 2.1b meals per day
115,500 tons beans = $80.9m
136,500 tons rice = $68.3m
Total $149.1m/day
I'm sure at these quantities you can get much better prices of rice and beans, even just browsing on alibaba. I'd guess we can probably get that down under $100m from alibaba. Probably even lower at the quantities we're talking about.
This isn't just a Discord problem, it's a consumer rights problem.
I've gone through this same thing with multiple companies, most recently after an identity theft, and the only recourse for consumers at this point is to indefinitely wage a campaign of turning a grievous issue into such a massive PR and/or legal department war that they have no choice but to attempt resolution.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. --H. L. Mencken, US editor (1880-1956)
The Nazis openly mocked the democratic principles that they used (abused) to gain power to take freedom away from their enemies. It is a fact of life that sometimes the freedom of one party conflicts with the freedom of another. Every legal system acknowledges that. No freedom can ever be absolute for everyone.
The Weimar Republic was a half baked democracy though. There were too many tiny parties with 1-3% which weakened the main parties, making it easier for the NSDAP to gain mindshare.
Back then powers were not sufficiently separated and the president had more power than he should. Both the president and Hitler wanted a more authoritarian state and worked together. Hitler failed to get a majority but he wasn't satisfied with a coalition. He instead asked the president to arrange an emergency government to buy more time while Hitler used his goon squad to threaten members of the parliament to just quit or vote the way he wants until he finally got the majority of seats in parliament and then used that majority to abolish the parliament entirely.
This sounds almost identical to how I was raised, even down to the age of transitioning between the two styles, and I was doing contract web development work by 13, too, before cramming for the GED and ranking 99th percentile in science. I'm now working in AI with a startup of my own.
I honestly can't say I've ever met (or even heard about) anyone with such a similar story -- care to chat sometime?
I went to public school and was fixing computers for $$ at age 12, doing web dev at 16 and running a company installing Ethernet cards in college students computers at 18. That was all outside of school.
