I don't think he's arguing for rural, just expressing concern about the *biggest* cities.
> entertainment, variety, walkability, and many other benefits that rural places don't provide
I appreciate all of this as well, but at the end of the day, I moved to a city with 80x the population of my hometown because of a (specific) job. Rent is also significantly higher, and if I had to consume my savings to survive here, I'd surely move out. Entertainment and walkability have secondary importance compared to putting food on the table and saving for retirement.
> As a result they now can't book a hotel, use credit cards or access everyday services. As Nicolas Guillou says 'You are effectively blacklisted by much of the world's banking system'
Totally agree that this is absurd and disportionate, especially as a consequence of a US decision.
I mean, it's one thing to sanction a foreign billionaire: freezing their assets, thus preventing them from wielding their power in our borders is perfectly reasonable... But for a normal citizen living within your borders, freezing everything and preventing them from working is disenfranchising them and denying them all personal property rights (without judicial process!)
There are a bunch of examples of people in Europe who have also been sanctioned because of their political work. The first two that come to mind:
If we're moving away from USA tech, I hope that we're not blindly trusting stuff simply being hosted in EU, but rather use the opportunity to spread our eggs in more jurisdiction baskets (rather than only the EU basket)
Who is 'we'? Which data are you referring to? (If you mean e.g. Samsung Galaxy with GrapheneOS, by all means.)
We need to consider a few factors.
If you are from EU, and you want GDPR to be enforced, you need to work with countries which follow your local law. The USA is hinting at no longer doing so, since it retaliates with sanctions.
Now, where would you host, and why? Norway seems like an interesting target, since they are very high on renewable energy. Norway isn't part of EU, but part of the EEA. Latency with Asian countries such as South Korea, Japan, and Australia isn't going to be ideal. But if the company behind it is from there, and they have a local presence in Europe, why not? Could even work with proprietary software. FOSS can help here.
Hardware is a difficult target. It is near impossible to avoid China in this regard. And if you do, you often end up with US products. OSHW can help, but it is rather uncommon. We also have a constraint: we need energy efficient in Europe.
It it's something public/political like a Lemmy/Mastodon instance, I would pick a foreign jurisdiction which is unlikely to enforce something like the UK's OSA or USA and EU sanctions... I don't know where it would be best, some country in the Balkans, maybe?
If it's a service (even commercial) meant to be used only by a few people that I have direct (personal or business) relationships, I'd just ask their preferences (and bias towards the cheapest jurisdiction for hosting).
If it's something B2C, hosting exclusively outside of Europe would probably just make things more difficult to me, so it'd probably be within the EU (Hetzner?)
Besides the appeal of "though people", the idea that we're also in a cycle, of which the current phase is the worst one, is also basically the Kali Yuga concept, popularised by openly nazi figures like Julius Evola and Savitri Devi
If people are unhappy about their current society, they'd be better off learning about the economic causes, rather than esoteric memes.
I think, on top of the cycle aspect, there's also an aspect that the people who trot out that quote think they're part of the few "hard men" of current times. Eg They (and their ideas) are the solution to our problems.
That’s not a ban of nvidia chips though. It’s for a few of the biggest companies, and is specifically telling them not to buy a made-for-china SKU:
> The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia’s tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter
BlackBerry hasn't been OEM for their last few phones - the KeyOne, 2LE, and 2 were all outsourced to TCL, who is still making handsets. This would also fit with BlackBerry's security image, and even pull in the OnwardMobility vapourware.
I'm every bit as skeptical as you are, and in no universe is BlackBerry the OEM in question, but I would like to live in my delusion until GrapheneOS proves me wrong - I want a keyboard, dammit!
> I doubt even someone as big as Samsung will be willing or able to develop their own alternative OS
Huawei pulled it out with HarmonyOS (I don't know how good/bad is it, and if it'll have staying power, but other companies are putting in the effort)
PS: btw, Samsung already had its own, non-Android OS with Bada (of course, developing a new OS is only the first step, getting it to be successful wouldn't be easy)
Huawei has a whole-ass Chinese government behind it with quite a lot of incentives to move away from Google. Samsung does not. Heck, China's making its own GPUs and x86 CPUs. They're not great, but when the incentives over there are that strong, the market forces are clearly in a whole different universe compared to the rest of the world.
Bada lasted, what, 3 years? So it did better than Firefox OS (unless you want to count KaiOS as the same thing), but not by much? Not a great look I'd say. And things haven't gotten any easier during the past 15 years, with Apple and Google's positions being more entrenched than ever.
> Huawei has a whole-ass Chinese government behind it
I don't like how Chinese companies systematically get reduced to "it's because the government can help them". The US TooBigTech get a ton of help from the US government, starting with political pressures when other countries want to regulate them.
Huawei have really good technology and very competent engineers. It's not the Chinese government that does the engineering.
DJI is years ahead of everybody else technologically, and that's again not the Chinese government doing the engineering. Let's stop believing that the US are superior in every single way and that someone else doing better means that they must be cheating.
Equally lets not forget that china sees this as a key strategic necessity for a forced reunification attempt on taiwan, both for national security and the ability to produce chips solo.
Two things can be true. They can have great engineers and government money. Theyre not mutually exclusive.
Governments all over the world try to support their economies. It's not just a Chinese thing. How much does the western world invest in LLMs? But for some reason, we only call it "cheating" when China does it and is more successful than us.
What an outburst lol. I didnt call it cheating. Its just as worth noting as when it happens elsewhere. Perhaps you should stop reading what isnt there.
(I'm not sure how many Vietnamese actually love USA, vs how many don't... I just want to remind that different people in the same society might hold different opinions, and the sentiment is certainly not monolithic)
I never really looked into it, but it looks like the vast majority of Vietnamese were born after the war so US culture and trade are way more important contributors to opinion. Vietnamese are some of the most pro-US people in the world.
Vietnam had such massive population growth that there are very few people who even remember the war. On the other hand China was pretty much always ingrained into their “national consciousness” as a permanent massive threat.
I think there's a kernel of truth in what you said, but you're also talking about avoiding accidental "income inequality" in this comment, and "economic stagnation" in the other.
It seems like you might've moved the goalpost a bit...
At the end of the day: any entity that works for the public good (be it a co-op, a non-profit or a state owned enterprise[1]) would be a better recipient of the free labour provided by f/oss hobbyists, than a for-profit multinational... And often economic performance is equivocated with financial performance. At the end of the day, if everyone can put food on the table[2] (here and in the developing world), I couldn't care less if some GDP metric might imply that "there's stagnation actually"
[1] My point being, that a SOE will have more bargainining power than a small co-op, and thus be able to fight unequal exchange and compensate for income inequality
[2] "food on the table" is a proxy for: food itself, shelter, healthcare, affordable heating (or cooling) and consumer goods and services (tech gadgets to learn and keep in touch with family, long distance transport to visit relatives, etc.)
Ok, but the market is absolutely flooded with exploitative stuff, laden with micro transactions and a trickle of miniscule rewards, in attempt to addict the user, rather than genuinely provide enjoyment.
How do you even discover the good games that are worth being played on Android?
> entertainment, variety, walkability, and many other benefits that rural places don't provide
I appreciate all of this as well, but at the end of the day, I moved to a city with 80x the population of my hometown because of a (specific) job. Rent is also significantly higher, and if I had to consume my savings to survive here, I'd surely move out. Entertainment and walkability have secondary importance compared to putting food on the table and saving for retirement.