I can tell you that, at least for Europe, they’re doing pretty much the same thing as the US, only it’s higher tariffs rather than blocking the Chinese products.

The effect of special protectionist tariffs on the competitiveness of local companies might not be as strong as for outright blocking of the competing foreign products, but it’s in the same direction, which is why recently even Tesla (which are shit at the actual building cars part of the business) were wiping the floor on EVs with massive European car making businesses which had enormous expertise in actually making cars and decades to evolve EV tech and failed to do so.

Corruption is so entrenched in Portugal that unlike pretty much anywhere in the World, Libel is an actual CRIME prosecuted by the local version of the Public Prosecution Office, which in practice means that no actual damage has to be proven (the legislation literally talks about “protecting the honor” of the person targetted by the libelous comments) and only people with the proper political connections to get the Public Prosecution Office to act (i.e. politicians and rich people) get to be “protected” by this Law.

Oh, and in a country infamous by an extremelly slow Court system, they in practice expedite Libel cases where politicians are the “victim”.

So even descriptions of systems to detect Corruption have to be very carefully worded so as to not even imply that anything caught by them is actually Corruption.

I’m Portuguese and, having also lived elsewhere in Europe, firmly believe that in the domains of Politics and Justice, Portugal is basically a chunk of South America that happens to be in Europe. If it wasn’t for the EU - mainly the laws and pressure coming via it, many ultimatelly originating in places like Northern Europe - the country would be an even bigger shit show.

Clearly they think that gaming is the same as working.

This shit has been in place and in use since the Patriot Act.

It’s also been an open secret that they do it for industrial espionage purposes so never bring company devices or devices configured to access the company network over.

Part of the reason I’ve avoided the US for vacations or even just changing flights since the early 00s - I’ll just go to Canada instead.

“Burning the future of the company for extra personal upsides in the short term” is pretty much MBA-Age management strategy summarized in one sentence.

A loss of overall competitiveness of the local companies is actually a well known and studied problem with using tariffs and import restrictions to protects said local companies.

So any competent government which desires for their local companies to survive and prosper will seek different ways to strengthen then which don’t suffer from that problem. The Chinese government is doing just that, the US government is not.

By all indications, US politicians are spectacularly incompetent and/or are following a strategy of burning the future of US companies for a short term boost in the money they yield for current CxOs and investors.

NEVER, ever, ever host your projects in the site of an American company.

The actual problem isn’t at all making a 4G mini-computer: you can literally buy the necessary parts as modules and wire them together with a a half-way decent microcontroller board and an smallish LED display and then make some code for it in something like Arduino IDE (though I would recommend Platform IO + VS Code instead).

The problem is making it small (especially thin) and capable of running of batteries for days rather than hours.

For example, if you’re trying to actually solve the hard part of the problem you would be better of using a micro-controller with an ARM core rather than the ESP32 as those things are designed to use less power. Also you wouldn’t be able to use boards as those things usually waste power versus designing your own.

That said, it’s a nice hobbyist project.

I do believe there is also the concept of export taxes, though its much rarer than tariffs and generally only used to avoid increases in price of a locally producted product due to high demands from countries which can pay much more for it.

Luke was a late bloomer whilst Anakin was a child genious.

For avoidance of doubt my point is in no way a criticism of mankind:

• A % are always assholes.
• Also a % are always genuinely good people.
• The bulk of people are in the middle and kinda go with the cultural zeitgeist.

As far as I can tell, there are no more of the first kind than the second, though it’s my impression that the third kind, in the middle, are at times in average more pro-social or more anti-social depending on the predominant culture of a place and time.

In the current Greed Is Good environment dominant in the West I would say that the bulk of people who aren’t internally driven towards being a good person or being a selfish asshole tend toward “What’s in it for me” anti-social behavior if only because that attracts more rewards and less social pushback, though as I said and in my experience of living in a couple of countries, local culture also has a big say in that.

Never assume that just because somebody is a member of a minority they’re not prejudiced assholes.

It’s exactly because we’re all humans that assholes are equally distributed across all groups defined by things other than behavior and political beliefs - no such group is inherently composed of better or worse individuals than other groups.

People in groups being oppressed are less likely to behave as assholes simply because the assholes in those groups fear reprisals far more than the assholes in the dominant groups and in my experience plenty of people who behave meekly because of being part of an oppressed group will start behaving as assholes if given power and immunity to reprisals.

This is how you end up with phenomenons like, for example, anti-Transsexual Feminists.

Well that’s a shame.

I’ve been looking around for a replacement to my aged Samsung A6 (which has been given an extended life by replacing the factory ROM with something with less bloatware, but is still pretty limited in terms of memory) which is not a Surveillance Outpost for just who knows how many nations and just about any companies willing to pay the 3 cents of whatever for the data, and all the Linux and degoogled Android makers only have 10"+ ones, which are too big for my use case which carry a tablet on a coat or trousers back pocket when I’m going to be sitting down somewhere and waiting for something so that I can read books and maybe browse the internet on their free WiFi.

Personally I would LOOOVE a small Linux tablet, but I’m OK with some kind of privacy respecting Android which isn’t riddled with backdoors mandated by governments which have Information Courts issuing Secret Bulk Information Collecting Orders, like the US and the UK.

My hope is that the crazy RAM and HDD/SDD prices and hence crazy prices for new PCs will push more people to try Linux.

Oh, yeah.

I’m just thinking the more well known stuff with the “fancier” desktops and shipped with applications like LibreOffice and Firefox which are probably closer to familiar and don’t look like a step back for Windows and Mac users.

If you really want to extend the life of your hardware to the max, well, whilst Linux has discontinued support for 486 and Pentium processors last year, any hardware newer than that (so, around 30 years or less) will still run the latest kernel and as you mentioned there are distros targeting machines with very little RAM and HDD space.

And still blazingly fast for web-browsing, e-mail and office applications, as long as you don’t put Windows 11 in it.

This is around $250 (and that’s the version for Europe, shipped from Spain and the price includes VAT).

Six months ago it was just $150, so the current RAM and SSD prices seem to be fully included in the device price.

I got one to replace an aging Windows 8 PC of a family member who only does web-browsing and e-mail and put Linux on it, and have another one at home working as a TV Box + Home server.

With Linux that’s more than enough for browsing, e-mail and even office apps. Not a machine for gamers, but then again gamers aren’t buying “entry level PCs”.

Well, if the USD loses it’s reserve currency status, even $1000 or $2000 are perfectly possible in 2 years.

It’s not actually the “older hardware” that’s responsible for security vulnerabilities, it’s Microsoft chosing to end support for Windows 10.

That “older” hardware capable of running Windows 10 is more than capable of running any Linux distro which will keep on getting security updates for a long while (and you can just upgrade it again if that stops as Linux is nowhere as hardware demanding as Windows, especially the latest, Electron + AI, Windows).

For people who just use their PC for Office software, e-mail and browsing - who are the ones getting entry level PCs - hardware has been more than powerfull enough for 2 decades, and it’s only Windows bloatware having grown to use the available computing power that has forced people to upgrade the hardware.

Guess I know which brand my next smartphone upgrade will be.

If they did some nice 7" tablets too, that would be perfect.