I spent some time in Poland for work about 10 years ago. I remember the cities being very expensive and chic - on par with Paris, Berlin, etc but when you got out of the cities (my project was in Bydgoszcz) it's a completely different world - poor, rundown, etc. would be curious how it is now and also where most of the Ukrainian refugees settled.
Most Ukrainians (and Belarusians) settled in major cities, starting with Warsaw. In 2022 I had a Belarusian girlfriend, and at some point I tried convincing people coming here to target smaller towns, to no avail.
Still, most of them stayed here, work hard and make it, despite rents literally doubling since when the war started.
You haven’t seen that much of the US if your only impression of small towns and rural areas is rundown and poor. There are some vibrant and beautiful towns scattered throughout “flyover country”. Plenty that are decrepit too, but rural America is not a monolith.
> There are some vibrant and beautiful towns scattered throughout “flyover country”.
In my experience, these places tend to be where rich people from cities own vacation property or can commute to a city for work. An example in Minnesota is the Brainerd Lakes area, which subsists almost entirely on people from the Twin Cities visiting their lake cabins from May to September. There are some nice small towns and plenty of beautiful homes, but it’s a result of outsiders bringing money in. Next door you have Aitkin County which is poor as hell because it’s basically a swamp/peat bog that has been partially drained for agriculture, 65% of the county is wetlands: https://www.mngeo.state.mn.us/maps/LandUse/lu_aitk.pdf
Most of rural America has been hollowed out to the point where local hospitals are closing. I’m not making any judgements about rural poor people, just that rural areas tend to be poor due to a lack of local economic opportunity.
So you brought up two examples that are right next door to each other. I think you are underestimating how big and diverse the US is, as well as the positive impact the tourism and service industry can have. Rich people aren’t the only ones who go on vacation.
You’re right about limited economic opportunity, which comes with its own problems. That doesn’t preclude towns from responsible use of their natural resources or using the tax base to reinvest in the town. Not all do, but some do, to varying degrees of success. This idea that the majority of the US outside of urban areas is in a state of rotting collapse simply isn’t true.
I think this is largely an east vs west thing. Rural areas in the west certainly arent rich, but theyre generally not dirt poor like rust belt areas in the eastern US are.
The hospitals are closing because there arent enough medical schools in the US so there is a doctor shortage and since doctors are highly educated the vast majority of them prefer urban living. Most rural hospitals have to pay around double to convince doctors to work there compared to urban hospitals.
I never said that was my impression, as I'm sure there are also some vibrant small towns in Poland as well.
But it's fallacy to think that lots of wealth hasn't further concentrated in cities over the last 50 years. A lot of my family is from upstate NY, and I remember visiting them as a kid and feeling like they were nice places. They have all deteriorated greatly since I was a child. E.g. people always complain about how expensive housing is in the US. Well, there are plenty of cheap places to live in upstate NY - housing costs in a lot of those places have lagged inflation for decades. The problem is nobody really wants to move to Cortland, NY.
The issue looks especially clear when you compare small towns in close proximity to big cities compared to further out. There are lots of vibrant, quaint small towns on Long Island, for example, because they get a ton of money from their proximity to NYC. I often think a lot of the upstate NY towns would look just like the "cute" Long Island towns (e.g. similar architecture and history) if they had an influx of money.
These don't have normal ram, right? The ram is part of the die of the processor? So... what's going on? They're keeping the chips for themselves? They're moving production to other lower memory configurations? But why? That's where demand is? Probably more demand at higher memory though?
I'd buy one or two but I can't stick them in a Colo because they don't have LOM or dual power supplies but I've been seriously thinking about buying one and just keeping it at home and having my Colo servers talking to it for local deepseek.
Not a high priority though considering how cheap deepseek is.
The ram is "unified" meaning it's a single shared between CPU and GPU, and it's "on package", meaning the RAM chips are packaged together with the CPU / GPU die, but it's just regular old RAM chips.
It’s still dedicated ram on a separate chip, which is affected by supply shortages.
The ram is soldered onto the SoC in close proximity to the main arm chip. What’s different is that it is simultaneously addressable by cpu and gpu cores, not part of the same die as the apple silicon unit.
I would be surprised if the USA is even able to plan far enough ahead to put in a sea barrier/gates in time to protect New York City, similar to London. New Orleans? At least the old town is elevated.
I do think there are plenty of religious people out there who minimize the ill effects of climate change, believing (hope against hope?) that God would never let mankind destroy itself. Good luck with that.
Way too many Americans either don't know or disbelieve that a substantial chunk of the body politic, and now our elected and military leaders, actually literally believe this type of stuff.
IMO any eschatological beliefs whatsoever should be 100% universally disqualifying for any political or military position, no matter what book title or special ancient zombie character they're filed under.
“Leaders” who believe this kind of stuff don’t end up running developed states. It’s the leaders who know how to make use of morons who believe this kinda stuff who do.
Eh, no. Trump of course has zero actual ideology, but there's pretty solid reason to believe e.g. Hegseth and Mike Johnson actually believe this type of stuff.
“Even if you stopped climate change today, New Orleans’s days are still numbered,” he added. “It will be surrounded by open water, and you can’t keep an island situated below sea level afloat. There’s no amount of money that can do that.”
Type 1 is often an island situated below sea level.
For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevopolder . Island. Surrounded by open water because that's actually a good idea. Below sea level. 400 000 inhabitants. 2 cities, major agriculture, minor airport.
Ever wanted to grab dinner on the sea floor? Visit Almere Center. Though lots of people find it to be a bit boring in person.
Want the same sort of thing in the US? Consider dropping the Jones act. Right now it's illegal to bring the equipment that builds these things into the US.
The Jones act doesn't prohibit anything about bringing ships into the US to construct things. The closest reason I can think of you thinking that is it allows injured sailors to sue for damages. Maybe that equipment leads to a huge number of injuries?
So a crane like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvicq-kvVbw ; it picks thing up and sets thing back down. In US waters? Verboten ("nee meneer, helaas verboden", in this case). Sure there's workarounds with barges sometimes; but it gets silly.
Jones act and more specifically dredge act even: you're moving stuff inside US territorial waters.
Both cases it's not (or barely) made in the US, and you can't hire the big crews from elsewhere. There's no competition, and this has resulted in no incentive to learn, keep up or even try.
I am increasingly pessimistic about the long term future of the US. What are the chances that we will still be one country in a generation or two? Trump might have poured gasoline on the fire, but the federal government has been in decline for years. Congress is completely dysfunctional. The filibuster prevents the senate from doing anything. The president is at war with the civil servants and more interested in grift, punishing percieved enemies and erecting monuments to himself instead actually leading.
Addressing climate change requires massive changes and a lot of political courage. There is none.
There is no legal mechanism left that could correct course at this point. You would need to have a constitutional amendment to drastically reshape government and that's DOA. All that's left is snow decline and eventual dissolution
The absence of a legal mechanism does not imply the absence of a mechanism (or even the absence of a peaceful mechanism.)
While there is a legal process for amending the Constitution which, as you note, is likely intractable in the status quo conditions, Constitutional change—whether peaceful (even if there is the implicit consequence of force if compromise is not reached) or not—historically and globally is often an extralegal process that is retrospectively legalized, rather than a legal process under pre-existing rules.
A sufficient crisis could trigger an Article V convention, which already has a large amount of states pledged to join, but the changes coming out of such a convention probably aren’t going to be good for the public.
An Article V convention is a legal process and Amendments proposed by such a convention have the same ratification threshold (which is the barrier, not the proposal threshold in Congress) as Amendments that are Congressionally proposed.
Now, an Art V convention could be seized on as an opportunity for organizing extralegal change, but then Art V process obviously isn’t necessary precondition for that, just a potential opportunity.
Clean indenting is about saving time so you don't spend way too long getting lost trying to understand what seems like an insane piece of code until you realize it was a mundane bug hidden by incoherent indentation.
The practical case is less time spend on rebasing/formatting code - IMO formatting standard is very helpful as then it's the same as storing AST. There's also better preserving of git blame and that's likely why they have done it as single operation as otherwise you would have everybody messing with that part and now you know there's single commit that touched everything and if blame is on it then you check previous edit.
Not many pirates on the Chinese coast these days since the Zheng Yi Sao in the beginning of the 1800s. She had a fleet of 400 ships and 50,000 pirates.
this ship just takes a short route back and forth between two cities.
I never understood googles strategy in mobile. At the beginning I assumed that they would make a reference platform showing what's possible - a high-end pixel with all of the latest hardware and software features to promote their OS and software. Driving advancement in hardware by others using android. But instead it seems like they're competing at all levels with their hardware and are trying to win at consumer-level hardware against china instead of with their software and search and now ai - areas with high margins and where they make money.
Since their hardware group is t working at promoting their software group they should probably just spin off and do their own thing.
The Nexus and early Pixel eras have been a series of weirdly positioned and priced models year after year. Google didn't even bother trying to sell them in more than a handful countries.
Then Google switched to a pretty bad Exynos based SoC and consistently shipped underwhelming hardware at price points aligned with Apple... requiring absolutely insane discounts or promotion campaigns, even at launch. Can you imagine Apple giving you AirPods Pro or a Watch if you buy the next iPhone 18 on day 1?
We've seen things like the Pixel tablet that should have been sold at half its MSRP to stand even a small chance against the iPad.
And I won't even talk of the many hardware issues... my dad's Pixel 7a was fully reimbursed for 25% more money than he actually spent buying it.
> Can you imagine Apple giving you AirPods Pro or a Watch if you buy the next iPhone 18 on day 1?
Apple does exactly this, they just launder it out to their carrier partners. My wife's carrier was recently offering a free Apple Watch if you pre-ordered a new iPhone before launch.
Similarly, Apple was already selling a laptop (the M1 MacBook Air) at MacBook Neo prices, but only via Walmart (and they were continuing production of the M1 MBA specifically for this deal).
Carrier deals aren't comparable as they're subsidized by inflated phone plans.
If you buy an iPhone on day 1 from the Apple store you're certainly not getting any gift or discount. With Google you can pre-order and get a $200-300 gift, wait for deals (Black Friday, Christmas, ...) or if you aren't in a rush, wait six months for resellers and carriers to invariably start dumping their stock at half the MSRP. Meanwhile the base iPhone price has decreased by 10-15% maybe.
And I don't see how older MacBook Airs are relevant here. Apple has always sold previous generations of their hardware for years, directly or indirectly, either by actively maintaining production or simply letting resellers deal with old stocks. Google keeping the previous year generation on their product line-up is a very recent development. Not very long ago they would abruptly stop selling the Pixel N before the N+1 were even announced.
> Carrier deals aren't comparable as they're subsidized by inflated phone plans.
I don't have any insight into what deals the carriers have on the backend, but in my region, the price delta between like-for-like BYOD plans and plans with subsidized iPhones are effectively nil.
Either the carriers are getting discounts from Apple, or everyone with BYOD plans are subsidizing phones for people who get them through carriers.
e.g. I'm currently seeing a carrier plan where the total plan + device cost over 24 months is ~$1,600 and you come out of it free and clear with a 512gb iPhone Air that's $1,749 retail. I don't see how that's possible for the carrier to offer if they're not getting discounts from Apple.
My point is that Apple doesn't want to look like they're giving discounts on their store, so they engineer any discounts to go through third parties.
I work at a carrier in Switzerland, if I take the phone we push at the top of our inventory, the iPhone 17 Pro 256 GB:
Phone: 1099 (Apple's MSRP).
24-month phone plan, 50/month the first year, then 81/month: 1572. Discount: -300
Now BYOD:
Phone: 1067 at the biggest and most reputable online retailer.
Near identical phone plan sold through our discount/virtual brand: 30/month i.e. 720 over 24 months (but you can leave anytime).
So even assuming you buy it on day 1 with zero discount from Apple's MSRP, that 300 gift costs you 852 CHF really.
Now if I look at our most agressive competitor, you get the phone for free if you spend at least 1752 on a 24-month phone plan.
They have a better phone plan at 15/month i.e. 360 over 2 years. BYOD is still way cheaper.
Okay, so maybe your carriers aren't getting good discounts. The existence of plans without good discounts doesn't really show anything. Of course some carriers will have some plans without good discounts.
Like I said, for one of my local carriers, I'm seeing a plan that costs $1,600 that includes both two years of service and a $1,749 MSRP phone.
There's no possible way for a BYOD plan to be cheaper after accounting for the phone MSRP, they'd have to pay you $150 for the SIM card and two years of service.
They need to be competitive to some degree for the hardware to actually work as a valid reference and explore those spaces. They also need the business to be successful enough to be a proper threat to would be rebellions from the hardware partners. In general, it is about the software.
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