https://www.neowin.net/news/meta-is-reusing-old-ddr4-ram-in-...
I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that going "but china" isn't going to help the US much going forward.
The upcoming Alberta separatist referendum that is funded and boosted by foreign agitators isn't intended to succeed. It's intended to cause a festering wound in Canada to prevent it from growing in strength and independence from America.
As far as I'm concerned America has already lost the next impending major war. They've spent the past 25 years blowing trillions on purposefully unwinnable wars that serve to enrich American oligarchs. This has left the American military structurally weakened and mis-optimized to fight small groups of terrorists instead of fighting an enemy with comparable and perhaps superior ability.
We've also seen the decimation of the manufacturing base in America and with it the economic security that it provided the middle class and with it the power and skill set that comes from being able to design and build thing. Finally, the United States' recent choice to blow half their stockpile of numerous kinds of missiles all all at once while at the same time lacking the supply chain or even the manufacturing base to adequately restock their munitions as the nail in the coffin for the American empire.[2]
So what's going to happen in a world where America can't win a global conflict but is still protected from invasion by thousands of nuclear weapons? America is going to decline into a regional power that attacks its neighbours with impunity. You're already starting to see it and it won't be long until you see articles like this[1] about Alberta.
I don't want it to be this way, but it is.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43487443
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hit-with-demand-for-answ...
[2] https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio...
Are they cheaper? They are open-weight, so in theory, they are cheaper to run and do with them as you wish.
The problem is that they come from a place with a long and storied history of attacking digital assets in the US and the West in general.
Additionally, US support for taking Greenland is virtually zero. Chinese support for taking Taiwan is frighteningly high.
There is no need or advantage to a full frontal assault.
Perhaps, but in the last year China did build these:
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/03/stairway-to-tai...
The person at the top of the chain was asking why everyone is preparing for war. This behavior from China is why. It predates any of the Greenland Trump idiocy, too.
They've repeatedly stated that they'll use force to take Taiwan if necessary.
They are building the military power to make the full frontal assault.
I don't get why there's so much "oh, China's different" talk on here or on other online forums. I often wonder how much of that is organic versus something their propaganda/agitation ministries puts on.
But more generally, when the foundation of your country's morality is "all men are created equal" you really have given up the space to object to others doing what you do.
If honour is a thing.
That just leaves the facts. Which do you think is more credible and likely?
It has been accompanied by a large spike in military spending globally. The backlog of foreign military sales of US weapons just waiting for approval is ~$1T.
Do you have more information about this, or a source?
> Germany's defence minister is frank and plain-spoken, but also deliberate with his words and intention. When he talks about Russia, the future of the West and the possibility of another European war, the message however becomes stark: "Our experts say it can happen in 2029."
> In remarks published Wednesday, Generalleutnant Christian Freuding, the inspector of the German Army, said the 2029 date was not a figure pulled out of thin air by his government's national security establishment, but an actual consensus view among Western allies.
https://www.politico.eu/article/nato-mark-rutte-says-europe-...
> NATO Chief Mark Rutte urged member countries to do more to prepare for the possibility of large-scale war, warning that Russia may be ready to attack the alliance within five years.
https://www.rand.org/topics/taiwan.html
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-coun...
Every USA president since the fall of the Berlin Wall has implored NATO members take control of their own defense. The US has long since abandoned the two theater war doctrine. The US is not going to fight Russia. Doing so would just be taking the bait to split their forces when China simultaneously decides to mobilize in the South China Sea. All of USA military planning has been in preparation for that theater.
Trump's belligerence has accomplished the US foreign policy goals of every administration for the last 40 years.
If you're saying that it seems to you that the tactical goal was accomplished at the expense of the broader historical strategy, I would respond that yes, it does seem that way.
So.. back to how things were done in the old days.
spoiler alert: the cozy days of the colonial west are over. it will all be over soon, and one can hope but i don't guarantee surviving will be necessarily a lucky draw.
btw, this would explain fermi's paradox pretty well.
I also feel like the boomers offshoring everything to China in the 70's is one of the reasons things are worse off nowadays, but I digress.
This started to unravel as things got more tense with the increasing militarization of China and centealzatuon of power in Xi as well as well as Putins more aggressive moves.
The Ukraine war kicked the whole structure over and dillusioned a lot of people. The problem is that if suddenly history isn't over and war is a possibility again you need to start preparing for it. If you choose not to play the great game you don't avoid it, you just get crushed, and so as a matter of national survival and security you need to start preparing to meet near peer adversaries, but they see you preparing and they up their defensive preperations and military spending because you did and if they don't they might be crushed, and you see this and have to up your spending, and suddenly a massive amount of wealth is going to preparing for conflict.
The whole situation is almost identical to how things were on the eve of the 20th century, with radical advances in technology overturning decades of military theory and strategy, everyone is tense with alliances constantly shifting and real politick dominating everything because the alternative is the fate of the Belgians who had their country shorn from them and their people massacred by Imperial German forces. At the same time we see growing social unrest within nations (stoked by foreign actors trying to disrupt social cohesion of their potential enemies) and everyone posturing with more and more bluster because to be precieved as weak is to invite death as no one wants to make friends with a weak link.
The one important lesson to be taken however is that WW1 didn't have to happen the Great War could've been prevented, a major part of the conflict was the certainty that there was going to be a war. If we can choose to instead try and be peacemakers and bring the overall temprature of discourse down we can avoid another human catastrophe.
Unfortunately I think the actual reason is because they know (despite what they say in public) that climate change is a real and present danger, and the resource and migration wars are coming.
If you look at everything that seems strange through this lens (see for example: Trump talking about how the US needs to take Canada and Greenland) it looks a lot less strange. There's at least some sort of rational throughline, even if its awful and militaristic (and likely only revealed at all to the public at this point because Trump is an age-addled old fool that has a broken public-speaking filter).
And maybe introduce some technological improvements, too. Like portable millsites and leach pads so you don't fuck up the landscape with dead buildings and environmental waste. And maybe look into some chemical process improvements, like using DMSO instead of cyanide for leaching gold.
Oh, and look into using Z-pinching for mining so we don't need explosives, we just need capacitors and metal tubes and drills to make precision tunnels to grab ore and leave more of the land intact.