Yeah, well, when was the last time common people and business paid attention to IT Security experts BEFORE their systems were broken into?!

Also, who would pay the people with the necessary expertise to decompile all BIOS of all motherboard shipments (if at all possible, in this day and age when a lot of shit is encrypted with the keys inside a TPM module)?

I mean, just go at it another way - notice how thousands of pager sent to Lebanon were altered by the Israelis and nobody were aware of it until the Israelis made them explode.

In this day and age it’s pretty straightforward to just alter the software for some shipments and not others or add a weakness (like both Intel and AMD CPUs have) that can be used as a backdoor by software that’s installed remotely (for example, pushed as a Windows update, something which certain American 3 letter agencies can most certainly do since the have the power to demand the signing keys from MS).

There are huge numbers of vectors for spyware to end up in certain computers that start with subtly backdooring the hardware itself.

It’s about complex products which contain RAM rather than other component.

Anything made in China which has RAM in it will have its price affected by the price of RAM so if Chinese brands of such products have access to cheaper RAM than non-Chinese brands, they can outcompete the latter on price whilst delivering similar quality products.

Personally I tend to assemble my own desktop PCs, but for example in the past when buying a Mini-PC I would pick a Chinese brand one if cheaper since the quality is the same. Now imagine if the Chinese brand is now 1/2 the price of the non-Chinese one because the former uses RAM from China whose price is nowhere as high as the hyper-inflated South Korean RAM - in this kind of device were the quality is the same, the Chinese product will always be the better option if it’s half the price because of using way cheaper RAM.

It’s not a question of concern, it’s a question of what’s technically possible.

It’s technically possible to ship a motherboard with spyware capabilities in the BIOS.

Different performative elements and mechanisms for determing the subset of people who are priviledged elites, same operating principles.

Yeah, pulling the “America are good guys, China are bad guys” card at a time when America are unwavering allies and supporters of the nation who is openly doing in the XXI century the same kind of thing as the Nazis did, with equal levels of inhumanity and ultra-racist violence, doesn’t have quite the same power as it did even a decade ago (though even then the whole Iraq invasion thing had already showed the American “moral high ground” as being mainly a tall pile of mainly middle eastern corpses).

Well, you absolutelly can make digital products that run at least some built-in software and have network connectivity spy on people, but RAM is no such product in either sense - in neither runs software (and given it’s performance constrainst it would be stupidly hard to add it as a feature) nor does it have any network connectivity.

Routers and motherboards, for example, yeah - both have network connectivity and both include and run software so shipping them with spyware is just a question of the factory or distributer putting the right software in them (for motherboards, in the BIOS and running inside as secure code, inside the CPU itself or even in certain peripherals).

(It would be possible to put it in places with more indirect access to networking - such as SSDs - but it’s more complex at they would need to hack OS binaries on the fly)

Of course, even for the stuff were it’s possible, it’s seriously deluded to think only one of the nations with insane civil society surveillance levels that sells those things - China - would be adding spyware to it but not the other one - the US: devices with the capabilities to support spyware made in or designed in any nation which does a lot of surveillance are always suspect.

The Chinese government being much more fans of a directed market than of a totally unregulated one (neither of which is a Free Market by the way - that thing only exists when barriers to market entry are incredibly low, and it’s not as if any Jack or Joe can set up their very own memory production cottage factory in their backyard, so it’s not possible for there to be a Free Market in RAM under current technology), they’ll probably make sure that RAM only ever leaves China as part of more complex products (i.e. computers, smartphones, tablets and so on) made in China, thus making also Made In China for those product lines be more competitive.

(In other words, want a gaming PC or smartphone with more memory - buy the whole thing from China or pay 10x more)

If properly managed this could boost quite a lot more digital electronics industries in China than merelly RAM.

I’m not sure if this is still a thing or not, but about a decade ago there was this whole “dual channel memory access” mode that accelerated memory access for the CPU by accessing data from 2 DIMMs in parallel.

In motherboards capable of doing this, memory slots would come in multiples of 2, with specific slots being paired and if both slots of such a pair had memory DIMMs of the same size, the motherboard would use “dual channel” mode, otherwise it would use the slower “single channel” mode (it could also be forced by configuration to always use “single channel” mode)

Dual channel only really worked well if the timings on both DIMMs were pretty much the same, so people wanting to take advantage of this mode would buy memory sticks as pairs, not just having the same size and brand but even from the same manufacturing batch so that both had data access timings as close as possible.

If you occupied one of those “paired” slots with mismatched memory of the same size as the other slot of the pair and did not explicitly disable “dual channel” access on the BIOS, you could get memory problems because accessing both DIMMs in parallel had problems when they returned the memory contents at different rates or with different delays.

All this to say that maybe what the Lenovo started trying to do with the BIOS update was dual channel mode or similar, only it was pairing a soldered memory module with a memory module in a SODIMM slot and those have different memory access speeds because physical contacts and directly soldered pins have quite different electrical characteristics for high speed signals, so the former simply can’t safelly handle as high frequencies (and hence data rates) as the latter.

Part of the problem being that AI transforms people with low communication practice into wall-of-text producers and now the cost is on the readers to spend the time and energy filtering the AI-generated and reviewed and proofread stuff from the AI-generated and straight out the door stuff.

The simplest solution for this is to just refuse to consume AI-generated text. It’s no real loss since if one wants the AI answer, one can just ask the AI themselves.

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, that the people behind the biggest investment and financial scam of the century would, to make more money, fuck up people other than just investors!

Maaaan, look at those sexy Cat6’s!

I think that there are roughly 4 causes:

• As you mentioned, people promoted all the way up to the first position they are truly incompetent at, i.e. the Peter Principle
• Nepotism and cronyism - people are getting the jobs because who they know (i.e. “the old boys network”) or who their family are, not competence.
• People get the job because they’re good at personal image management and social networking - they mingle with the right people and project the right impression with things like speaking in a firm confident manner about things they know nothing about - which are fine skills to have and even applicable to some of the job of management (at the mid and above management levels), just not enough for the rest of the job of management, and that part missing is in most management positions the biggest chunk (and includes the stuff for recognition of risks and accounting for them).
• Upper level managers hire people like themselves to work under them. This partly overlaps with number 2 but goes further. When said upper level management is incompetent because they got in due to one or more of the other 3 problems, they hire people the same profile as themselves even if not due to those reasons directly (a simple example: managers who look and behave posh because they attended a posh private school will tend to hire managers who look the same hence are likely to have attended such schools themselves - this isn’t directly cronyism but ends up producing a similar effect as they’re selecting people from their social domain even if they don’t know them personally)

I would say that nowadays in management the first one is a pretty small fraction of it (except maybe in the less prestigious and less paid low level management positions) because people are rarely “promoted from the ground floor” nowadays and hiring for more prestigious positions is very heavy on the impression people project, so most of the problem are numbers 2 and 3 plus a bit of number 4.

Number 4 is especially pernicious because it means that once an institution is managed at the top level by people who do not recognize the importance of certain skills in management (like caring about and understanding risk analysis) it tends to mainly hire people who are the same for other management positions and even for replacements for the top job - people who don’t think a certain skill or mindset is important for the job are not going to have as a hiring criteria that candidates have such skill or mindset.

Yeah, even having learned to explain this shit in the IT Consultancy language of “supply contracts” and “mission critical”, it’s still not guaranteed that I’ll convince a manager to avoid or at least account for the higher exposure to outside risks when subcontracting certain things.

Nowadays, with 3 decades of experience in the Industry, I honestly think that the majority of managers, no matter how high in a company, are either incompetent as fuck or simply manage with as priority maximizing their next bonus in the full knowledge that they’re leaving traps for the next one to solve and if they do blow up during their own time, they’ll still personally end up better off by going for bonus-today-problem-tomorrow than refraining from doing so.

Risk analysis in IT Management nowadays is spectacularly bad.

If you become dependent on a 3rd supplier then their survival as a company is now a risk for you. It doesn’t matter how good the reliability you have contracted with them - if they go under whatever penalities in the contract for failing to deliver said reliability will never be paid.

You might even be at risk of them simply chosing to close that division - small company signing a service supply contract with a big company: good luck getting a contract where the parent company (rather than whatever paper company they spun up for that business area) actually has to pay you stiff penalties if they fuck you over.

As soon as mission critical anything is outside your company, a lot of otherwise irrelevant things become operational risks for your company.

This is why you don’t put your mission critical anything on an external Cloud supplier.

You know, stuff like the only copy of 70 years of TV history that’s actually just 50TB and would’ve fit a bunch of Hard Disks or Backup tapes.

For many years when I lived in Britain I had a good friend and for a while work colleague who came from Russia. At least when he studied there (so, 30 years ago) their educational system at least for Science and Mathematics was no worse than those in Europe. In fact it’s one of the few good things the so-called “Communist” countries tend to do - they invest heavilly in Education.

Beyond that, there are two different things:

• One is a country’s capabilities to have sizable industries operating at a certain technological level.
• The other one is finding a handful of specialists for very specific design projects in highly controlled environments where making a profit is no concern.

Whilst it makes sense that Russia has trouble in the first case of actually doing high tech as a business, in size and profitably, because they at least did have a very good educational systems in Science and Mathmatics it also makes sense that they do have people with the know-how there which they could gather for specific high tech design projects were “money is not a problem” since they did train techies as good as the rest of Europe and it was not that long ago so those people are still alive.

Actually the story of the 1960s family with 5 kids, a car and a good house on a worker’s salary is from Britain:

• A journalist in The Guardian discovered that his university educated daughter’s salary was the same salary inflation adjusted as his factory worker father’s salary, yet wasn’t enough for even a small appartment in London whilst hist father’s salary paid for the above mentioned house, car and family of 5, so he wrote an article about it.

Mind you, we see some version of this in plenty of other countries in at least the West - the story of how two university educated people need to work full time in a white collar job now to afford what a single blue collar salary paid in the 1970s is pretty common, though the difference from peak to through isn’t as large as in countries which were wealthier back in the 60s.

Even in my own native Portugal which was under a Fascist dictatorship until 74 and thus had no prosperous 60s in any way form or shape (in fact by then the country was so poor it was the recipient of Food Aid from the rest of Europe) and only really rose to normal European standards after the 74 Revolution, you see that effect between the 80s and present day - it now takes the salary of 2 university white collar workers to buy what my father’s single blue collar worker salary bought in the 80s.

People’s purchasing power is way down even though according to official inflation figures it’s supposedly not.

Note that official inflation figures are used in calculating GDP, were they deflate the Raw/Nominal GDP to make the Real GDP (the official one) and the more the inflation the less the Official GDP - in other words, the less the official inflation the more politicians can claim to have “grown the GDP” - ever since polticians started harping in the Press all about the GDP grew under their government there has been a strong political motivation to understate inflation (which is probably why the official inflation figures don’t include house price inflation).

Oh, yeah, Gold seems to fail miserably as a trade token in a growing economy.

However I’m not making the case that Gold should replace fiat currencies, I’m making the case that Gold is a good long term store of value in times of large political risks such as the ones we seem to be going through in the West right now (most notably in the US, though the explosion in wealth inequality and growth in the Far-Right is far from only there) as well as during economic crashes with global impact (such as what’s likely to happen when the AI bubble blows), whilst even the currencies of major stable countries are much less so.

There’s not going to be a “Brexit” impacting Gold as Brexit impacted the GBP or an end of the dominance period of the nation issuing Gold as there is sure to be for the USD.

You need a citation for the Physics of the creation of elements in the Periodic Table?!

Two points:

• We don’t have a fixed money supply in the modern system when banks can issue debt. Not even close. I suggest you read the Bank Of England’s paper called “Money Making in the Modern Economy” which I mentioned.
• We’re talking about different things here. I’m not suggesting Gold as a trade token, I’m not even suggesting Gold as a store of value for stable times, I’m suggesting gold as a store of value against things like large economic crashes (the upcoming AI bubble crash, possibly with a Realestate bubble crash) and those times when the dominant Imperial Power in the World is being replaced by a now one (such as it seems to be the case new ones, as now with the US decaying and China rising). I’m suggesting that, purely because Gold has way less exposure to Politics and human mismanagement in general than even major currencies.

I think I failed so far at explaining myself mainly by talking too much.

My point is simple: gold and fiat currencies are roughly the same, but gold isn’t issued by anybody and isn’t managed by anybody whilst fiat currencies are, so gold is less exposed to the risks inherent to greed and corruption of those who issue and manage currencies - there’s not temptation to “issue more gold” because it’s not at all possible, there is nobody deciding “gold interest rates” because there is no such thing (to have interest you need to have more money tomorrow than you have today, as today’s loan will be repaid tomorrow plus interest and you can’t really make more gold any faster than mining it)

Gold has less exposure to Politicians and Central Banks - that’s it, that’s the important difference.

In stable times when living in mature Economies, that difference is pretty much irrelevant, in times like now it can make a huge difference which is probably why the GLDUSD exchange rate took of with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and accelerated even more with Trump’s second mandate as POTUS.