American (maybe more broadly Western) Computer Consumer Products companies are indeed getting fucked.

The thing is, that doesn’t mean that the Future is one were Consumers are forced to not have PCs and have all their computing needs served from Big Companies’ Servers.

I think, going from evidenc of the former to expecting the latter is a jump too far to take since it’s only looking at one side of the equation in one part of the World.

It’s perfectly possible that it’s the Chinese companies that end up gaining from this, similarly to how in the EV space the result of Western auto companies not offering what most consumers actually wanted (which wasn’t a Tesla, since those are too expensive for most people) was that the Chinese created and expanded that industry are now handily outcompetting those Western companies in their home markets.

Chinese parts and Mini-PC (an area where there are still a lot of products well bellow $500) manufacturers are still happilly selling their products to buyers from all over the World on platforms like AliExpress and, as we’ve recently discovered, Chinese memory makers (actual makers using actual chip fabs, not memory module assemblers) are expanding their production and selling more and more product to consumer market module assemblers in China and Taiwan, filling in the void created by the big memory makers focusing on supplying the AI datacenter boom.

(PS: That said, the China side seems to be covered in the video)

Further, there are other natural reactions in other areas which go against a dystopian future of No More Personal in Personal Computing - for example, software makers, most notably game makers, when they’re scoping their products to the computing power that the expect will be available in 5 years, aren’t going to be targetting hardware significativelly more powerful than what is common now (because if they did otherwise their stuff wouldn’t sell), which means that naturally (though with some delay) the demand for more computing power and storage in personal devices is adjusting to the reduced availability of new devices with more storage and computing power, so rather that demand rather than going to go up it’s probably going to stagnate, meaning that the future is most likely one of people running old computers for longer and just repairing what breaks with parts from that generation (one where DDR4 memory is more popular than DDR5) that one where everybody (both consumers and software makers) meekly accepts that the only option is computation running on servers (something which, by the way, game makers have already tried with things like Stadia, which failed miserably).

In summary, yeah the consumer personal computing hardware industry in the West is hurting, but just that is nowhere enough to support this idea that in the Future, Worldwide there will be no more Personal Computers.

(PPS: My expectation of the likely future is probably closest in that video with that of the guy from Corsair).

They’ll listen to the lobbyists peddling them with hookers and blow (and promises of future non-executive board memberships and and millionaire speech circuit fees).

That’s all the expertise they care about.

A sterner finger wagging?!

Ideally the thing should be broken into a “Camera captures images and makes it available in an open format” side and an “Application for Linux/Windows/Mac/iOS/Android/whatever reads said open format data and shows it to the use/records it in local hardware”, so that if one’s chosen provider for one of the sides enshittifies you can easily replace it, but I can understand the tendency to make and launch the whole thing fully integrated as one non-interoperable big bundle from a single provider given that in practice “do it and they’ll come” projects that just provide data in an open format in the expectation that other people will make the software that uses it, almost always fail.

Exactly - the more easilly the “riff-raff” is to swindle or the less capable they are to push back, the more intensely and shamelessly the “upper” classes take advantage of the rest.

You don’t just see it in the historical trends (such as ever more reduced levels of broad representativeness of elected politicians in for example the US or Britain), you also see it across nations: for example after the 2008 Crash, the wealthy in France (with its tradition of public rebellion) were actually saying they should be taxed MORE, whilst the wealthy in England (whose closest to “public” rebellion ever was the Barons rebelling against the King leading to the Magna Carta) were openly lobbying the Government to be taxed LESS (and got what they asked for, with Britain endind up in Austerity, with the anger caused by it being successfully redirected against Immigrants and The EU, hence Brexit, so the wealthy were totally right in not fearing the “riff-raff”).

PS: that spirit of not provoking the streets of wealthy French did not survive the Macron years, especially once he won against the “Gilet Jaunes” (Yellow Vests).

Surelly since then nobody ever again trusted their ability to run anything!

“The enemy will become incapacitated when they can’t stop themselves from rolling on the floor laughing!”

Bollywood films are real and everything in India does involve some kind of dance!

Wrap it in aluminum foil.

Whilst this sounds a lot like a foil hat joke, that’s literally the easiest way to wrap something in a conductive material cage (i.e. a faraday cage).

If you don’t want it to look ridiculous, put it inside a box whose inside has been lined with aluminum foil.

Mind you, personally I too would just cancel that shit, but the option is there to carry on using it whilst blocking its radio emissions.

It would be hilarious if Chinese companies were the ones that punctured the investment bubble around AI in America.

Clearly German Authorities deciding what being a “Good Jew” is and splitting Jews into “Good Jews” and “Bad Jews”, is a German Tradition.

I reckon it’s via an USB-Ethernet adapter.

If you use USB Hubs you could theoretically add as many as you want on a single USB port if you daisy chain the Hubs (if it’s a really large number some of the Hubs must have external power).

Granted, performance is limited.

Never tried it, though, so maybe there are further limitations.

The version I know is from the UK.

Sadly, yes.

That’s the one which IMHO tends to be over-roasted.

Yeah, that wall of text is my rationale for doing exactly that.

Personally I’m more of a believer in the saying “Politics is Acting for ugly people”.

Looks like countries in Europe and North Africa with at least one Starbucks store.

From my own experience living in a couple of those countries, this doesn’t mean much as Starbuck presence in some is pretty much residual with a handful of places in main cities or airports, serving mostly tourists (who, at least at first, don’t know they can get better and way cheaper coffee - not to mention pastries - in the local coffee shops which are all over the place)

For example, the UK (which has zero coffee tradition, though it does have the imported notion of patisserie in places like London) has lots of Starbucks whilst for example there are all of 11 Starbucks shops (almost all of which in tourist areas, two of which in the Airport) in Lisbon which is the capital of Portugal (a city of 1 - 2 million people), whilst there are thousands (probably tens of thousands, as they’re stupidly common) local coffee places just in Lisbon plus pretty much all local restaurants serve proper expressos made with properly roasted good quality Arabica beans (though Portugal does have a tendency for over-roasting) in Italian expresso machines.

That map most definitelly does not confirm the claim of Starbucks being a thing in Europe since a lot of that green is “is present”, not “it’s common”, much less “has a large market share”.

Having lived in multiple of those countries, lets just say that most of those greens aren’t anywhere as green as in a few others and even the most green of all (probably the UK) aren’t as green as the US.

For a lot of those countries (which have long traditions of good coffee), Startbucks have only a handful of stores in one or two major cities, mostly frequented by tourists since the locals can get better coffee from local coffee places and its way cheaper.

(Were I am now, Portugal, there’s a coffee place just about in every corner in any city, plus restaurants, all serving perfect expressos from Italian made expresso machines, with the most expensive cup in a place like Lisbon costing about €1.20)

You’re seriously deceiving yourself if you think there being and handful of Startbuck stores in touristic areas in a country with a strong tradition of coffee drinking is Starbucks being “a thing” there.

That full to the brim mini-shot cup is literally more quantity than a short expresso.

Any company based in or with operations in American can receive a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC, aka FISA Court) order to allow mass access to data in systems they control (which definitelly includes networked machines running Windows for Microsoft ever since Microsoft has been able to push software to them - in the form of updates - to do anything they want in that machine).

These orders cannot be legally divulged by the recipient and can only be disputed in FISA Courts, the proceedings of which are themselves not public and cannot be divulged unless the side fighting the Authorities wins.

In other words, companies based in or with operations in the US can receive secret orders from an American Foreign Surveillance court which they must comply with without divulging them and which they cannot dispute elsewhere but that court, which has many special rules making it different from a normal Court, with for example the proceedings being secret.

The Surveillance System in the US is far more powerful, systematic and well entrenched than that idea you have that “companies do favors for the Feds” - that shit hasn’t been true since at least the Patriot Act.