Home » Open thread 12/27/2024

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Open thread 12/27/2024 — 15 Comments

  1. I hope that wasn’t in New York…the Gestapo will be breaking down his door to confiscate his pet any minute now.

    The lesson of Peanut being, of course: if you rescue a wild animal, keep quiet about it and don’t post videos about it on the internet.

  2. I wish people wouldn’t post these videos. 99 times out of 100, taking in a wild animal is a catastrophe. The one time it isn’t, it goes on Youtube and then everyone thinks they can do the same.

  3. This morning I was trying to figure out this photograph at Victory Girls:

    https://victorygirlsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/bald-eagle-resized-1.jpg

    The bald eagle is named Mr. Lincoln:
    ________________________________

    Mr. Lincoln was hatched at the American Eagle Foundation’s Eagle Mountain Sanctuary. He was raised by his parents, a non-releasable breeding pair named Liberty and Justice, until eight weeks of age and was then taken along with his siblings to the AEF’s hacking tower on Douglas Lake.

    After Mr. Lincoln was released, he flew 550 miles during his first two weeks in the wild! Shortly after, he was seen stealing fried chicken off a boat dock in Indiana. He then lived off bacon for a while in Michigan—compliments of the family who owned the backyard that Lincoln frequented. Because Lincoln never learned to hunt, only scavenge, he became very hungry and weak.

    In September 1998, he was captured, fed to a healthy weight, and returned to his hometown in Tennessee. He was put into a large enclosure with a live rabbit to see if he was capable of capturing his own food, unfortunately this was not the case. Because Mr. Lincoln proved incapable of being able to hunt, U.S. Fish and Wildlife deemed him non-releasable and the AEF became his permanent home.

    Since then, Mr. Lincoln has been seen by thousands of people during education programs and has been trained to fly in ballrooms and outdoor events during the National Anthem!

    https://eagles.org/meet-our-birds/bald-eagles/mr-lincoln/
    ________________________________

    Proud to have you aboard, Mr. Lincoln!

  4. The scaup is trying to sleep in the company of mallards but this idiot gull has drug a salmon skeleton out of the water and is disturbing everyone’s sleep by dragging it through the sleeping area.

  5. Aaron Watson is an earnest young man with an interesting YouTube channel covering much of the same terrain as Peter Zeihan, though not so cute and alarmist, and with more raw data.

    He basically agrees with Zeihan on China. Zeihan says that data coming out of China is diminishing and unreliable. Watson puts more meat on that bone.

    –Aaron Watson, “Why China’s Economy is About to Collapse”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rjPrIw5pFU

    Worth watching if China is on your beat.

  6. neo:

    FYI: I find the site has gotten noticeably slower in the time — ~15 secs — it takes for me to click “Post Comment” and then see my comment.

  7. China is in deep, deep economic trouble, across the board, but especially as it pertains to chip and electronic production.*

    *See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-bIPcy_F6Y

    and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkDF7w-bnVs&t=465s

    and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDhMIpjWiY

    and, generally, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iySECQEQxY

    and on U.S. ban on chip making equipment https://www.voanews.com/a/us-to-block-sale-of-cutting-edge-chip-making-equipment-to-china/7884774.html

  8. I noticed the discussion of Project Stargate and remote viewing a few nights back. When I dream, I remote view places I’ve been, and it’s like I’m back there. If I remember the dream and have an idle moment after waking, I can continue to remote view and maybe correct the mistakes in the dream. But how I could possibly see places I’ve never been to, or see what’s going on now in places I was at years or decades ago is beyond me.

  9. P.S.–From what I understand, the Chinese can fabricate less sophisticated, lower end chips for use in things like consumer electronics, but have neither the technical expertise nor the equipment to manufacture the kinds of much more sophisticated and capable, lower and lower nanometer sized chips used in things like AI.

    Chips being developed here today are in the 2 nanometer range, China is reportedly stuck at the 11 nanometer level.

    And, due to various bans on selling the Chinese chips and chip making equipment, according to reports they have to buy used, older chip making equipment from overseas and, even then, these massive, very expensive and intricate machines need constant supervision, adjustment, and maintenance, which is supplied by foreign experts, who are reported to be exiting China.

    It is very hard to really know where China is technologically, because of all of the propaganda they put out, claiming all sorts of technological progress when, in fact, a lot of the things shown are apparently GCI generated fakes, prototypes which are never ready for or put into production, or just a facade–you are shown some piece of technology but it doesn’t contain any actual mechanism, it’s just a hollow shell.

  10. Snow on Pine,
    And we’re supposed to flood our country with H1B workers because Chinese ‘competition’.

  11. huxley

    The site has been doing some weird things lately and I don’t know why. For me, every now and then it’s slower than usual, but most of the time it’s much faster than usual. I have no idea what’s going on. I communicated with my host, and they don’t know either but think it has to do with periodic attacks by bots or something like that.

  12. Re: Chinese chips

    Snow on Pine:

    That was my understanding too, but alas, it’s not so simple:
    _________________________________________________

    US efforts to curb advanced chip exports to China haven’t exactly stopped the restricted chips from entering China, according to a new investigation that found an underground network of over 70 sellers who claim to receive dozens of the AI chips every month.

    The chips get into China through couriers like a Chinese student who brought six Nvidia A100 GPUs from Singapore to China back in November, The Wall Street Journal reports this week. The unnamed student reportedly said he received about $100 for each GPU for bringing them into the country—well below their actual market value.

    While the US has export restrictions on taking advanced US chips to China, Singapore and many other countries that can still get the chips legally don’t. This issue makes it inherently difficult for the US to actually enforce its own rules once the chips leave its borders.

    https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-ai-gpus-a100-smuggled-into-china-through-underground-network
    _________________________________________________

    NVidia has repurposed its GPUs (graphics processing units) for AI and is now the top dog supplier of AI chips.

    If China played by the rules, they would be shut out of cutting-edge AI development. They have no choice other than to beg, borrow or steal these chips.

    China also has energy problems and AI is a ferociously hungry beast for electricity.

    But they have no choice. AI is a big, I would say the biggest, factor in the future.

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