GBR48 comments

Not the first time someone has been 'spiced'. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4147346/Customer-46-says-BLINDED-raging-curry-chef.html

More economic damage and more inflation as vassal states pander to Washington. Most of this stuff is not manufactured in G7 countries and never will be.

Regimes that pursue policies that increase inflation will get kicked out of government when it spirals upwards. Nothing erases a regime like inflation. So I guess they will get what they deserve in the end. Even in Japan, where state restrictions on rice production, importation and marketing led to rising prices.

Impoverish your citizens in the name of geopolitics and see where it gets you.

You need a cutting edge processor? - wow. You must type really quickly.

Most office PC systems do not require anything remotely cutting edge and haven't done for years. Your Works package will not run any faster on the latest AMD Ryzen than a Works package did on a Pentium running Windows 98. As people are increasingly mug enough to subscribe to online software (SaaS), the speed (and reliability) of your internet connection is more important than your CPU anyway. You could be using a dirt cheap dumb terminal, as that is how SaaS works.

The NPUs for 'AI', which are sanctioned, are hardly a problem, given the absence of use, value, merit, social benefit or ROI of 'AI' in the workplace. Systems are more secure if they have no 'AI' on them. Companies are better off with Windows LTSC (or Linux).

The churn rate for tech is so fast, that you can save a fortune by buying off spec/used systems. That's why they EOL operating systems - they have to force you to upgrade to maintain their revenue streams. Otherwise people could happily be using ten or fifteen year old tech for work. Offline, you can use legacy tech with proper standalone apps rather than SaaS, and be more secure, as your system doesn't touch the internet.

The last upgrades you may have needed were Blu-Ray drives (which had limited use) and faster USB ports (available as a slot-in PCI card). Everything else has been cosmetic - PR or scam.

Science and research may need faster CPUs, but they should be switching to clusters, adding more, cheaper processors, and dodging the financial penalties of new kit. The Chinese may end up leading in areas like retail clustering, in response to sanctions.

Gamers (and crypto miners) will always chase after daft fast CPUs and GPUs, but have less need for an NPU.

The liability is Donald Trump. US unis will dumb down to cater for less intelligent locals and slide down the rankings. The US economy will lose the 'first option' of bagging these gifted students and their talents when they graduate. An awful lot of talent is up for grabs right now as the US follows the UK in limiting foreign student intakes. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity to expand, enhance and rise up the league tables.

quote: over fears personal data could be used by China for espionage or propaganda purposes.

The Chinese government must have spent an absolute fortune hiring enough highly trained agents to monitor all those cat videos and Taylor Swift covers. I hope they are supporting their mental health to protect them from exposure to such content, day after day.

Introduce a buy-out clause. If a company takes more than 10% of the energy from a nuclear power plant, it has to buy the plant itself, and pay for its eventual decommissioning - including the curatorship of all the waste it creates, for as long as is necessary.

'AI' pollutes the computing environment and further reduces security and privacy. If you run a business, you need to avoid this stuff. Vendors should be forced by law to include an 'off' button for it.

It is a good idea to avoid contact with the military, wherever you are. There will always be trouble and it won't be them coming off worse. Give them a wide berth and don't have any dealings with them. If a military base opens near you, move away.

Depressingly familiar. There may have to be modern re-runs of the Kent State and Orangeburg shootings before American public opinion decides to turn away from authoritarianism.

Or folk could follow the prefecture they visit, hail from or are interested in by subscribing to their Facebook page or Xitter feed. Events would appear on their feed. Would do the same, and wouldn't cost the taxpayer a bean.

A good example: https://www.facebook.com/tottoritouren/

This is an enjoyable trip out from Tokyo on the current shinkansen, to see one of the originals, combined with a visit to Hikawa shrine (a 20 min walk from Omiya station), the local bamboo grove (at Hikawa-no-mori Culture Hall 氷川の杜文化館) and some good shops on the walk back to the station.

Energy is one of the many interesting aspects of robot development. There are bodges, obvious solutions (the robot switches its own battery or plugs itself in to a charger) and ingenious metabolic ones. The bodges are useful for when designing other aspects of robotics in the hope that the two developments can then be integrated. It's much more interesting than 'AI', which gets too much coverage and too great a proportion of the VC.

Drug mules are usually vulnerable people threatened with violence if they don't comply with the cartel.

Exactly what the authorities already do over drawings, paintings and photoshopped images. Prosecute the the individual responsible if it is deemed a crime. After the fact.

You cannot have a bit of censorship. You prosecute after an offence, or you switch to fascism and implement state oversight.

And you should be prosecuting just the creators of the image, not the social media company, the people who sell graphic design software or the people who sell the computer it was done on. That is a cheap way of censoring everybody because a small minority misbehaves. Only fascists censor.

Tourists eating rice? Let's bury that for good.

40 million tourists staying for an average of 2 weeks. That may be an overestimate as many will come for a week and some South Koreans visit for a weekend. So that is 80 million tourist weeks of additional rice consumption. Annualise it: 80/52= 1.53 million annually in addition to the resident population of 124m. So across the year, an increase of just over 1% people, maximum, eating rice.

1% increase. Max. And with several built-in overestimates.

quote: Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle.

That would be a good thing.

The greatest dangers of 'AI' are to those who replace human expertise with it, to cut costs. Lets hope the resultant failures are publicised so we can enjoy them, and others can learn from them. It's like the trend of switching to foreign call centres, a few years back, to save cash. There was a wave of companies doing that, lots of negative feedback, and most returned to using local call centres. Expect a similar pattern with 'AI' until the shine fades.

The more extensively 'AI' is used by companies to cut costs, the more risk they take on. And the more popular companies that continue to use real people will become.

The only benefit will be an increased awareness amongst the general public, not to trust things that they see, read or hear at face value. That's a good thing. People will learn to do a bit of due diligence and not be so gullible. It might make life harder for politicians though.

quote: Yet MS et al are determined to shove it down our throats.

Check out Windows LTSC. Consider Linux. Use free and open source software like LibreOffice. Avoid Cloud storage and SaaS ('Software as a Service' on subscription). And only use tech when you need to. The less tech we use, the less exposed we are to the inherent risks - hacking, malware, failed updates, 'AI', Recall.

To boost innovation, Japan needs to make fundamental changes in education (and parenting), whilst promoting on talent rather than age in the workplace, and prioritising innovation over consensus. It will not do this.

AI will take Japan no further than the metaverse, blockchains and NFTs did, but it will see a lot more JPY transferred to the USA to pay for it.

And if you ask an expert (or even an AI that has been scraping the net) what foreign talent Japan actually needs, they will highlight the UN's recommendation for lots more migrant farmers, carers and other manual workers. Japan wont do that either.

It's just another tax, like Trump's taxiffs are a sales tax. Every time the state takes more money from you, however they dress it up, it's a tax.

Wherever you live, these products are likely to be available. It's fun stuff to experiment with and often healthy. Give it a go. https://www.dovesfarm.co.uk/shop-category/ancient-grain-and-speciality-flour https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/zymurgy/pharaoh-ale-brewing-a-replica-of-an-ancient-egyptian-beer/

It's not that 'hidden'. It's a short walk from a Chiyoda line station. Nezu is a pleasant area with nice shops. The buildings at the shrine are beautifully detailed. Many visitors to Tokyo may just go to the Meiji shrine and consider shrines 'done', but there are lots of interesting ones of different sizes, wherever you go in Japan. You may find yourself alone at some of the smaller shrines and they can be very serene and atmospheric, especially at sunset.

You can tell how many tourists a shrine expects by their shops. Some are clearly doing a serious bit of trade, others are more modest, providing ema boards and something for visitors to remember their visit by. When I went, I think Nezu had a small one staffed by a lone monk, so they probably weren't on the tourist itineraries. Most tourists will run through a list of the biggest attractions and go home happy, so worry less.

Organic Emmer wheat is available for about £3 a kilo in the UK if any Brits want to have a go. Alternative flours (wheat and non-wheat based) are interesting ingredients and quite popular. You can buy pastas that have been made from them quite readily.

The reason we grow the crops we do is because we have massively increased the yield, disease resistance, weather resilience, reliability and ease of processing over the years, using natural hybridisation.

We have global supply chains so we can all benefit by growing them in places where they grow best and can make resource savings all round by scaling up production. As the climate changes, some places may have to change the crops they grow.

It's interesting to recreate past foods, and heirloom varieties are beneficial in breeding programmes and for home gardeners, but the scientific development of our food crops and our global supply chains have allowed us to make the most of the crops and resources that we have, and have kept a lid on famine, particularly in the last century and a half.

Switching back to primitive crops grown at small scale will only reduce our resilience in the face of climate change. Breaking our global supply chains will see a return to regular regional famines.

AI will have niche value and be an alternative interface option. The evangelical stuff is a scam. An enthusiastic scam because the last few - the Metaverse, NFTs etc - didn't go so well. They want to repeat their success with the cloud/subscription/SaaS scam, making everyone more dependent upon their products, so this time they are giving it their all and forcing us to pay for it even if we don't want it. The fallback is convincing politicians (the least tech savvy people) that AI is a national imperative and essential for military hardware. That may eventually offer some return to investors when the bubble bursts. User data won't.

AI is not really 'I'. There is no understanding. It merely copies and extrapolates from (in most cases, obsolete and unreliable) data sets. If they tried to emulate human thought processes, they could train it on any data (without copyright issues), and then teach it on licensed, reliable content (encyclopaedias, theses, how to guides, well regarded texts). But they are not doing that. They took a short cut and just recycle a mish mash of occasionally reliable data, polluted with opinions and disinformation (social media, websites), fiction and out of date material. The AI you are being sold proves the old computing adage of GIGO - Garbage in, garbage out.

It would have been an interesting, if not always reliable adjunct to search engines. But not something you would want to pay for, or use for anything important. And you would want to be able to exclude it from your kit.

Additional tech spends should focus on ensuring intranets and infrastructure is entirely separate from the public internet - which excludes SaaS and cloud use, minimal data holding and use, offline storage/archiving, and the use of less, simpler, more resilient tech combined with analogue/manual solutions. AI wouldn't make my top 10 of tech things to spend tech cash on.

The speed at which courts work (in part because lawyers are paid by the hour), is their Achilles heel.

These events are of use to historians. We have seen well run nations collapse surprisingly rapidly before, but seeing them do it up close is an eye opener. In both the UK and US examples, the speed has been astonishing. The presidential system is clearly easier to switch to absolutist control than the parliamentary system. Trump's gambit of ignoring the law (so far) seems to be effective. Potential victims are understandably fleeing the carnage. Quite a few wannabe dictators will be learning from all this as well.

Normally the two houses of the US government freeze policies until a compromise is grumpily agreed. The Republicans in Congress have worked out that all they have to do is nothing, allowing Trump to do the things they are supposed to have control over.

Project 2025 increasingly looks like a script for a coup, undermining the constitution by a series of back doors. So far it is working well enough for them, whilst creating an ever larger number of victims. At some point this will impact on the retail economy and the general population. Will Trump declare victory and back off, or crank things up a gear.

Revolutions don't just happen to other people. And usually faster than you expect.

quote: might help discount retailers like his that buy excess inventory from other retail companies.

Yeah, there will be lots of stuff on offer as companies go bust and liquidate. That's what you get in a badly run 'Banana Republic'. You would have thought that countries would have learned from Brexit, not copied it.

This sort of thing is common in papers where 'AI' has been used to write it and has not been checked.

Animals and plants cross borders, particularly when the climate changes. They do it on birds, animals, the wind, ships, food, goods and people. In most cases they are benign additions to the mix. In many they are beneficial - buddleia is fabulous for wildlife, despite being an aggressive spreader, and horse chestnuts have rooted themselves into our culture. In a few cases, they cause what we consider to be problems. But the reality is that this is how the planet evolves. Our so-called 'native species' are simply the ones passing through when scientists decided to catalogue them. A snapshot in time.

If we are to have thriving environments in the future, with climate change, we are going to have to accept these changes happening much more frequently, the replacement of our native species with different ones, and the need for more aggressive species that will be able to cope with a degrading environment. With more extreme weather, it will be natural for us to have fewer, tougher species. This is an example of the planet dealing with change. We should learn from it.

We can help some species move to find homes they can adapt to, and should trial more species as potential replacements for our current 'native' species and food crops. Attempting to freeze our species mix as it is now and curate it like a museum is neither a scientifically honest approach, nor a viable one.

The controlling mentality has to go. The planet will do what it has to, to cope with a changing environment, and we should be learning to embrace it, rather than trying to stop it. Today's invasive species are tomorrow's resilient survivors. It's not 'damage', it's evolution.

This goes way beyond green energy. Large infrastructural projects take years to complete and are expensive. If there is a high likelihood that the next regime will simply pull the rug on previously agreed funding/credits, no sane company is going to invest there again, under any regime, Democrat or Republican.

I've eaten five year old pasta and it was fine. A lot depends upon how you store it. I doubt they are actually selling something that is unfit for human consumption, but if it is virtually fodder, they should be giving it away to those in most need instead of selling it. They just need to zero taxiffs on imports and allow foreign supplies to take up the slack. If they want to support farmers, they can, by direct payments.

Best to avoid the US for the foreseeable future. It's a big planet and there are much safer countries to visit for work, tourism and education. I'm anti-censorship, but the Trump regime is creepy and abusive. Just avoid it.