I’m Portuguese.

Portugal fell so far down that in the XX Century until 1974 it was under a Fascist dictatorship and was so poor it got food help from other nations in Europe (but the dictator sure liked to celebrate the “Time of the Discoveries”).

In our divergence of opinion, at least specifically when it comes to the timing of the fall of the US from its peak, time will tell.

PS: I don’t think the destruction due to internal unrest is merely from economic disparities - that’s just one of the symptoms. I think it’s mainly social, cultural and structural factors that create downstream problems like said economic disparities and keep on doing it because the problem is structural, not merely economical, and those things sustain themselves (for example, corrupt politicians aren’t going to put in place structures to fight corruption, quite the contrary). The fall is not merely from economic disparities, it’s because the whole society has grown “fat and lazy” - the spirit of people and, maybe more importantly, of the power elites who control how the country operates, is that they are “winners”, but all of that is anchored on the successes of their ancestors (in the US case, one example of that is American Exceptionalism), and that kind of posture doesn’t self correct and the nation itself is too big and powerful for it to be corrected by external actors. The whole thing is a bigger version of the very commonly story told all over the World in various variants about how Wealth goes in cycles of 3 generations: the first builds it, the second consolidates it and the third blows it away - having been brought up in wealth the third generation doesn’t have the same spirit as the people who built the wealth in the first place.

Anyways, this is just pseudo-Philosophical thinking and, as I said, time will tell.

On that last point, Rome, Greece, China, Egypt, Spain & Portugal (from the Discoveries time), several Middle Eastern nations several times (from the Babylonians to the Persians and even the Arabs - back in the 12th Century the most advanced people in the World were Arabs, then known as Moors) and so on (if I remember it correctly the Mayan civilization fell before the Spanish Conquistadores got there, which would make it yet another one that fell to internal problems rather than external factors).

It’s a pretty common dynamic.

There is not a single competent politician with a history of working for the good of the many in an electable position in the US at the moment.

The closest was Sanders and you saw what the Democrat Establishment did to make sure he was stopped.

Also, I’m sorry but I was in investment banking at the time of the 2008 and after seeing how he unconditionally saved the worst abusers in that industry, I don’t think Obama counts as a good guy, so Bush to Obama wasn’t really a pendular move between extremes: by the time of Obama the choice for anybody other than the well-off and the rich had already been reduced to Greater Evil vs Lesser Evil. Obama was a masterful speechmaker, but when it come to actual policies he was just another neoliberal working for the 1% and once in a while making a show of throwing some crumbs to the riff-raff.

IMHO in terms of working for the many, America hasn’t had anybody anywhere close to Eisenhower as President since JFK.

Expecting that there will be a white knight president elected this time around given the state of Politics in America is pure Hope with almist nothing to back it (the closest is the guy who won the Democrat Primaries for NYC Mayor, and he hasn’t even been elected yet and we’re talking about a major city filled the people far more educated and worldly than the average American, so it’s unlikely that his likely victory will translated to anywhere else in America than maybe one or two other similar cities).

I think the problem this time around is systemic and “bipartisan” (in that both main parties stopped representing most people and just use different styles Propaganda to herd the sheep or just turn people of from voting altogether) and also linked to the natural end of the period where the US was the dominant nation (basically, in the schedule of the Rise and Fall of Empires, the US has already been long enough in the peak dominance period to have reached the Fall stage) and as I meantioned in my last post, if you look around at other nations that were once great, they tend to fall quite a lot and then stagnate for a couple of centuries before they start recovering and none ever gets back to its peak.

This isn’t really an America-specific problem it’s a much broader Human Societies problem, and whilst the details are different the general pattern is the same (corruption, pretty much all of the elites making money of unproductive activities and political connections, people in general having delusions of superiority that vastly exceed the actual present day achievements and so on).

I lived in a couple of countries on Europe and the daily and bi-daily shopping is only really for people who live in big cities and commute by public transport and will pass by a small grocery shop on their way home from work.

As far as I can tell most people do a single weekly shopping generally by driving to a supermarket or even hypermarket either on the weekend or at the end of a working day, hence the popularity of such large surfaces.

Even in places like The Netherlands people have side bags on their bicycles and can just cycle to a supermarket once or twice a week if they don’t feel like driving there and bring the shopping on the side bags.

From my own experience with my grandparents (farmers in Portugal), rural food planing timeframes are even longer than a week, as people relied (at least 50+ years ago) on preserved meats and longer duration things like dried pulses, certain fruits, and staples like potatoes for months or even a whole year and then add in season fruits and vegetables and even just go outside and pick up whatever was ripe then from a plot next to their home (so, for example, make soup with some salted pork bellies and chipeas from their food stores and some spinach and carrots picked up from from a farming plot near the house).

Anyways, even in Europe doing a weekly shopping is generally more convenient.

Mind you, it’s great when you live inside a big enough city and you can just hop out of the tram a stop or two early on your way home and go by a mini-market to buy, say, some milk and fresh vegetables, but that’s not how it generally works for most people, mainly because even in a big city, unless you live right by the store it’s more time efficient to do one big grocery shopping a week were you can go to bigger places with more selection.

People in big wealthy countries underestimate how far those nations can fall.

Argentina was the 5th richest country in the World at one point, and look at them now.

The higher you are, the more you can fall before hitting a new stable state: just look at those places which were once great imperial nations like Greece, Iran, Turkey or Egypt. I mean, most of the Middle East was once the seat of some great nation or other and look at them now.

The US going all the way down to the level of wealth per capita of, say, Russia, is a distinct possibility, if the structural elements which supported its high economic output start breaking (so, things like Education, the productivity of its companies and the belief of outsiders that investing in America is safe and has a good ROI, all things getting worse) and the higher a nation is in that scale the more such structural supports are required to keep it there (for example, not other developed nations don’t relly on their currency being the World’s Reserve Currency to prop-up its public finances), so the harder it is to stay there.

Being part of a Religion has social benefits, so don’t be surprised if a lot of those non-Atheists don’t trully believe it but participate in it because it’s good for them or because of social pressure.

Certainly, and speaking in terms of Christians which is the ones I’m more familiar with, considering the number of people who actual strictly even just try to follow ALL the teachings of Jesus or even all of the 10 commandments, almost all “Religious” people pick and chose which parts they believe and which they don’t.

(In modern society Greed and Envy by themselves are probably regularly broken by 99% of Christians).

Funny that more people own a car than have a driver’s license.

External 2.5" HDDs connected via USB for longer term bulk storage and using it as a NAS, a smaller internal NVME SSD for the OS and a larger one (but SATA, so slower) for the directory were torrents go to.

The different drive performances fit my usage pattern just fine whilst optimizing price per GB.

External 3.5" would be cheaper for bulk storage but the 2.5" are a leftover from when I was more constrained in terms of physical space.

Well, the N100 does have a lot more breathing space in terms of computing power, so it’s maybe a better bet for something you want to use for a decade or more, and that remote control I linked to above does work fine, except for the power button (which will power your Linux off but won’t power it back on).

I actually tried an Android TV Box (which is really just and SBC in the same range of processing power as the Pi) for this before going for the Mini PC and it was simply not as smooth operating.

That Mini-PC has enough computing power room (plus the right processing extensions) that I can be torrenting over OpenVPN on a 1Gb/s connection whilst watching a video from a local file and it’s not at all noticeable on the video playback.

These psychopaths have called Jewish Holocaust Survivors “anti-semites” for criticizing Israel.

Besides, there is no such thing as a racial groupmind (“Jewish hive-mind”) through which the actual trauma transmits.

Many Jews suffered in the Holocaust but many more did not, plus it’s been 80 years, so very few Jews alive today have actual trauma from it.

The whole idea of racial trauma is just the Racists trying to leverage for their own personal benefit the suffering of others who share with them nothing but ethnicity, which is why Zionists and Israel have been so big on it: as Genocidal supremacists they’re probably the worst, nastiest Racists around in the present day so of course they would claim their entire race is a victim on the backs of the suffering of somebody else to get support for their own actions no matter how malevolent.

(In fact supremacists always claim racial victimhood even without victims: the Nazis did it for the “Arian Race”, the KKK does it for the “White Race” and so on)

Kodi install instructions are here

I don’t use docker, I use lubuntu with normal packages. So for example Kodi is just installed from the Team Kodi PPA repository (which, granted, is outdated, but it works fine and I don’t need the latest and greatest) and just set it up to be auto-started when X starts so that on the TV it’s as if Kodi is the interface of that machine.

Qbittorrent is just the server only package (qbittorrent-nox) which I control remotelly via its web interface and the rest is normal stuff like Samba.

After the inital set up, the actual linux management can be done remotelly via ssh.

That said, LibreELEC is a Linux distro which comes with Kodi built-in (it’s basically Kodi and just enough Linux to run it), so assuming it’s possible to install more stuff in it might be better - I only found out about it when I had my setup running so never got around to try it. LibreELEC can even work in weaker hardware such as a Raspberry Pi or some of its clones.

Also you can get Kodi as a Flatpak which works out of the box in various Linux distros so if you need the latest and greatest Kodi plus a full-blown Linux distro for other stuff you might do the choice of distro based on supporting flatpack and being reasonably lightweight (I actually originally went for Lubuntu exactly because it uses a lightweight Window Manager and I expected that N100 mini-pc to need it, though in practice the hardward can probably run a lot more heavy stuff than that, though lighter stuff means the CPU load seldom goes up significativelly hence the fan seldom turns on and so the thing is quiet most of the time and you only hear the fan spinning up and then down again once in a while even in the Summer).

As for docker, there are a lot of instructions out there on how to install Kodi with Dockers, but I never tried it.

Also you might want to get a remote like this, which is a wireless remote with a USB adapter, not because of the air-mouse thing (frankly, I never use it) but simply because the buttons are mapped to exactly the shortcuts that Kodi uses, so using it with Kodi in Linux is just like using a dedicated remote for a TV Media Box - in fact all those thinks are keyboard shortcuts (that remote just sends keypresses to the PC when you press a button) and they keyboard shortcuts for media players seem to be a standard.

It really depends on what you’re doing with it and on what old PCs you have available.

I have an N100 Mini-PC at home in my living room connected to my TV which is both a home server and a TV-Box using Kodi (I even have a remote for it).

Having modern image and video decoding in hardware is pretty useful when I’m using it as a TV Box (there is zero stutter with it), whilst the rest of the time the thing mostly sits doing some low CPU-intensive server tasks (mainly torrenting and SMB server stuff).

Also, it’s a small box that fits fine on my TV stand without standing out and runs silent pretty almost all of the time.

Further, I don’t have any low power consuming old PCs around - the best are some chunky old notebooks, the rest are old gaming PCs which eat more power idle than the mini PC does at full load - and even the notebooks aren’t that low power as all that.

Mind you, for many years I used an old Asus EEE PC (a very small notebook running Linux) as home file server (with external HDs) and had a separated dedicated hardware TV Media Server box playing files from it, but eventually that PC stopped working and I found out I could just use my Router as a file server.

Last but not least, judging for how long I kept using my TV Media Server boxes (which over almost 2 decades I had 2 different ones and which as dedicated hardware could not easilly be upgraded when new video compression standards came out) 10+ years is definitelly my time-frame for using that Mini-PC.

All this to say that you should consider using old hardware, especially if you have some around and it’s task appropriate (like I did before using an old Asus EEE PC as a home file server), but also take in account what you’re going to do it and consider if new hardware won’t be better over the timespan you will likely be using it and if the being able to get a more task appropriate form factor (like how having a little box-size Mini PC lets me have it in my living room on a TV stand next to my TV and my fiber router) is worth it.

In summary, before you get hardware you should ponder a bit about what you intend to do with it before you decide what to get, don’t be afraid of using stuff you already have and also don’t be afraid to get new stuff if it’s actually justified by hardnosed reasons rather than merely some variant of the “new stuff smell” psychological effect when buying new.

Because shit like that has been called “Pathing AI” for ages.

(For example)

Also I’m very familiar with Machine Learning having actually learned it 3 decades ago when it was mainly just Neural Networks (there were other techniques schu as Genetic Algorithms, but ultimately NNs became dominant and is most of what we today call Machine Learning) and its most advanced commercial use was to read postal codes in mail envelopes for automated mail sorting.

The acronym AI has been thrown around for decades, even before Neural Networks were invented and well before Machine Learning was even called “Machine Learning”.

I work in Game Making.

There’s a ton of stuff in it which has been called “AI” for literally decades and almost none of it is Machine Learnrning: for example the A* pathing algorithm for characters in a game is called “AI”, as are Steering Behaviours that can be used in things like simulating bird flocks, and both are entirelly algorithmic, not ML.

In my own experience ML is seldom useful in games, mainly because algorithms are lighter and generally work more reliably.

You’re confusing use of “AI” in the Marketing of the present day tech bros trying to make money pumping up a Tech Bubble on top of certain very specific forms of Machine Learning, with the actual general meaning of the acronym.

Well, back in the day and before they invaded Poland, the British elites loved the Nazis (as shown for example here), and they’ve been siding with various lesser clones (such as Pinochet in Chile and Afrikaners in South Africa) ever since, so it’s not at all surprising that when the most Nazi-like ethno-Fascists since the actual Nazis went full gear into executing their own “final solution” for the “vermin” in Gaza, the British elites would activelly support them.

Having lived before in Southern and Northern Europe, I lived in the UK for over a decade and when I left it after the Leave Referendum (maybe my best decision ever) I believed it was the country in Europe most likely to turn Fascist and, so far, they keep on providing evidence that they’re well into that path and it’s not even the Italian-style “mild” Fascism but the hard German-style version, only with the British twist of using posh-twat deceit techniques to disguise its true nature, like somebody covering a steel fist with a velvet glove.

Plenty of good people over there (as proven by their 600k people march against Genocide), but British Power and Money elites are natural supremacists (both wealth and power over there are usually inherited and they actually have complex structures - involving “Public” Schools and Oxbridge - to make sure the scions of the elites, no matter how inept, end up heading companies, the Press, Politics and the Justice System) who absolutelly believe that some people are born inherent superior (themselves, of course) to the rest and have a “right to rule”, and that when slick deceitful posh talk does not suffice to make the riff-raff comply with their dictates, then using Force to keep the plebes in line (wrapped in the “velvet” of Legalism, of course) is natural, starting with the “rabble rousers” but going as far as needed until the plebes stop trying to dispute their dictates.

Basically we’re watching realtime as Britain slides back to the way of doing things from the days of Workhouses, indentured servitude and child chimeney sweepers, only this time around Britain doesn’t have the power to pillage other nations (or in fact the social and intellectual capability to achieve even a fraction of what their ancestors did) so the local Elites are plundering the rest even harder to keep themselves living in the luxury they’re accustomed to.

American is fucking itself with a bang, Britain is fucking itself with a fizzle - which is quite stereotypical.

Whenever I read here Canadians here hoping for EU membership, I think about this: I’m sorry mates but you having chosen the insanelly unsafe rules of the US for all kinds of things, most notably food safety, means your regulations are totally incompatible with merelly Single Market membership (which would literally allow free export of that dangerous shit to the rest of the Single Market), much less EU membership.

Decades of regulatory alignment with the US means that all manner of Canadian products are dangerous and shouldn’t be allowed into the EU, and now that your southern neighbor has shown its true colors beyond any doubt you should start unravelling that regulatory shit-show and align more with EU style regulation but, having lived in the UK when Carney was the head of the Bank Of England, I doubt he’s the man for it: it’s my impression that he’s a man who knows who butter his bread - and that ain’t the common folk - and it’s for them he works.

Each billionaire is an individual problem AND allowing billionaires to grab and monopolize so many resources and even looking up to them is a systemic problem.

Without the systemic problem which is Capitalism and the shallow, greedy present day society, billionaires would be treated the same as other hoarders - seen mentally derranged and stopped from going too far for their own good and the good of others.

There will always be nutters, but if the social system we have wasn’t broken, this very specific kind of nutter would never be allowed to cause the damage they do with their mental disease.

That’s because you’re probably not used to people from STEM areas who tend to be thorough rather than risk that some things might be mis- or not at all understood: the less one is sure about the level of knowledge or ability to keep up of those on the other side, the more thorough the explanation becomes.

Also the deeper you think about something the more elements there are to explain.

I some discussion about Nvidia somebody what complaining how they were used to 200 fps at 4K but some graphics cards couldn’t do it with raytracing on without using DLSS.

As somebody else in that thread said, it’s masturbatory fps numbers.

I thought the whole point of Israel for the far-right was that it is a place to dump all Jews from the rest of the World.