I’ve got plenty of criticism of Obama too, but he’s easily the best US president of the 21st century, and it’s not even close. And although nowhere near as good, Biden is still easily #2, because at least he didn’t start two trillion dollar wars for nothing. And although he’s pretty bad, Bush is still easily #3, because for all his many, many faults, at least he didn’t usher in a full-blown fascist dictatorship driven by narcissism and stupidity.

There’s no easier century to rank presidents.

51% says Trump is doing a worse job than Biden? WTF is wrong with the other 49%!?

Biden wasn’t great, but surely anything that’s not bringing the US to the brink of dictatorship and civil war is better than anything that is?

It will most certainly stifle innovative ways to leech more profit while the taxpayer is left holding the bag.

Ah, who am I kidding? They’ll find something new. It will just spark more innovation.

Space feels cold if you have some fluid to evaporate, like blood or something. But servers will very quickly run out of whatever fluids they have if they tried this. (And so would you in their place.)

The only option to sustainably lose heat in space is radiation, which works, but is slow and limited in capacity, so these server satellites would need massive radiators. It’s not impossible to do. ISS also has massive radiators.

So servers in space is possible. How big you can make an orbital server park, I don’t know. I can imagine that with enough radiators, they start catching each other’s heat, so there might be a limit to have many radiators you can put closely together, but I have no idea what that limit might be.

Companies that are too big to fail and need a bail out, should be automatically nationalised.

For decades there has been tension between European data protection principles and US principles that corporations should be able to monetize your data and the US government should be able to access everything. Our dependence on US tech companies had made our position weak. We should have subsidised European cloud infrastructure a long time ago.

Especially the last few years it’s been terrible how many companies and organisations have surrendered to US Big Tech. Even Dutch banks have abandoned their own excellent contactless payment system to surrender to Apple Pay and Google Wallet.

Honestly, that’s always been my hunch about that. Such a baseless accusation doesn’t come out of nowhere; he must have been projecting something.

Thailand is known for its seedy sex tourism, but there are also tons of legitimate reasons to go there. I’ve always had this feeling that the “pedo guy” remark came from Musk mostly thinking of child sex tourism when he thought of tourism in Thailand. Because that’s the part he was most interested in, even if he wasn’t acting on it.

But it looks expensive and has a reputation for being expensive. That’s what matters to him. Do you think he can handle actual money?

I would take one closer to the exit.

That does sound like Trump’s kind of guy.

True, but nobody is bound by it. There are other ways to sell on PC, there are no other ways to sell on iPhone. And games bought elsewhere will work just fine on a PC that has Steam installed. Anyone can leave at any time, or buy from anywhere. The only way to do that on iPhone is to switch your entire phone with Android. Apple’s position on the iPhone is far more controlling and monopolistic than Steam’s on PC.

The Steam tax might be too steep as well, but these are not identical situations. It’s far easier to avoid Steam if you don’t want it. I prefer to buy from GOG, and only buy from Steam when it’s cheaper or not available on GOG.

But Valve doesn’t have a monopoly on PC games. You can sell your own game, or sell through GOG. On iPhone, Apple has the monopoly and they abuse it.

Next they’ll take 30% on every transaction through my banking app.

Definitely.

Especially under Trump, but also at various times in the past, has the US used corporations as an extension of foreign policy, and used foreign policy to help major corporations. Not just wars for oil (the most obvious case), but also leaking intelligence to help US companies, or using US companies to hurt people abroad that the US disagrees with (like ICC judges).

I don’t know how many examples there are of China doing similar things. Around the introduction of 5G phone networks, the US was paranoid about Huawei involvement because China might use it to spy on us. Their control is such that they could. No idea if it’s actually happening. But US cloud platforms are definitely sharing data with the US government.

I think the important metric here is fuel burned: how much fuel do we burn just to ship fuel to where it can be refined, and then to where it’s needed?

It would probably use less water too. Crops require a lot of water, and biofuel crops more than most. I’ve heard it’s putting a massive drain on the available water in some places.

You mean coke futures?

Read what I wrote. I am considering other perspectives right here. Are you? You seem to see this as a contest that needs to be won by condemning your opponent, instead of an honest exchange of information and views.

I said I’ll look into these issues you raised, and I will. But a claim is not proof, and I’ve explained why I’m skeptical about some of your claims, while also expressing the possibility that you might be right. What more do you want? Are you here for an honest conversation at all?

Look who’s being deceptive.

I go out of my way to point out I’m no expert and don’t know much beyond what’s common knowledge, and yet you start out with this piece of nonsense:

You should do research on topics before speaking with any kind of authority on them

I’m not claiming any authority, so don’t pretend I did.

Overall the people working in these terrible 996 conditions has been a fraction of the overall worker population

So what you’re saying is that I’m right. This does happen. And also:

This is probably one the areas I need to look more into overall,

So you don’t actually know as much as you’re trying to claim.

My point is that this 996 schedule would be unimaginable anywhere in Europe. We’ve got labour protections that China apparently doesn’t.

And of course it’s great that China is moving in a better direction, I’m not denying that, but as long as abusive practices like these can happen in major corporations, you can’t really claim to take better care of your workers than Europe. (Europe is also still far from perfect, and varies wildly per country of course, but I’d say we’re doing this a lot better than the US and China.)

the US is probably one of the best analogs in terms of the economic size

Wait, is this a “we’re too big to do it right” argument? I usually hear that when people defend America’s lack of healthcare, labour protections or abundance of murder. It’s a bullshit argument. There’s no good reason why a large country couldn’t do this. Sure, individual European countries aren’t that big, but the EU as a whole is half a billion people with an economy comparable to the US and China, and despite having all these diverse different countries with their own laws, none of them allow these sort of labour conditions. Though I must admit here too enforcement is sometimes lacking and real slavery has happened. But not by major corporations, because it gets punished harshly when discovered. It’s usually people taking advantage of migrant workers.

What is demonstrably provable is that the workers within China are becoming more and more satisfied with their labor conditions year over year AND the Chinese governments is very serious about investigating and resolving labor disputes.

That is awesome news, and I look forward to the time when China’s labour conditions surpass those of Europe. But it’s not there yet.

And developing? It’s pretty industrialised, and has a lot of high tech industry. Keep in mind that the EU has a lot of former Soviet-bloc countries that were dead poor when the USSR collapsed, and are now doing much better. Or look at the development of Finland or Ireland over the oast century. Those weren’t colonisers, but colonised.

The numbers show that more and more of the businesses within China are falling under state control - which is quite literally how that would work in a socialist system. The people control the government, the government controls the corporations, therefore the people control the corporations.

That’s only true if the people actually do control the government. I never hear about elections in China, and elections don’t mean a lot when the government controls all information. And Chinese leaders often seem to have that cult of personality thing that you often see in dictatorships.

Personally, I’d rather see companies controlled by the workers rather than by the state.

The Nordic model is actively failing because of growing privatization in these countries too.

Failing? Last I checked they’re still topping all the happiness, freedom, equality and lack of poverty charts.

Of course they have problems; no country is perfect and there’s always room for improvement. And social democracy is a compromise between socialism and capitalism.

Just because there are regulations on corporations doesn’t mean you are safe from the intrinsic need of private corporations to grow as the parasitic entities they are

That is true, but with strong labour rights, antitrust enforcement and progressive taxation, it seems to be working quite well, actually. You do need constant vigilance of course, but show me a system where that’s not the case.

China has an extremely robust democratic process

You’ve pointed this out several times already, and I have to admit it’s the first time I’ve heard this. As far as I can tell, China has taken away democracy in Hong Kong. I never heard about elections there. All media seem to be under strict government censorship. From what I’ve heard, you can’t even talk publicly about Winnie the Pooh, because that’s taken as mocking Xi.

I’ll try to read up on China’s democratic processes, but for now I remain skeptical.

You have no idea what kind of technical debt is hiding below the surface. I don’t either, but any non-trivial application has some, and hasn’t Galaxy been around for a while? It tends to accumulate.

Either way, I see it as a good sign when a company takes the time to modernize a piece of software, and moving to linux sounds like a great opportunity to do that.