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A great piece on the many attitudes the "Westernalize societies" adopt, I think all stemming from the belief that the nature (along with everything else) is their bitch to rape without serious consequences: America is trapped in a pandemic spiral.
Yes, the story looks at America - where the "sins" are deep and easily recognizable - but the same pitfalls exist more or less in most of the Western World.

As the U.S. heads toward the winter, the country is going round in circles, making the same conceptual errors that have plagued it since spring.

Army ants will sometimes walk in circles until they die. The workers navigate by smelling the pheromone trails of workers in front of them, while laying down pheromones for others to follow. If these trails accidentally loop back on themselves, the ants are trapped.
...
The spiral begins when people forget that controlling the pandemic means doing many things at once.
...
1. A Serial Monogamy of Solutions

Stay-at-home orders dominated March. Masks were fiercely debated in April. Contact tracing took its turn in May. Ventilation is having its moment now. “It’s like we only have attention for only one thing at a time,” says Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida.

As often happens, people sought easy technological fixes for complex societal problems....

... Several experts I’ve talked with have been asked: What now? The question assumes that the pandemic lingers because the U.S. simply hasn’t found the right solution yet. In fact, it lingers because the familiar solutions were never fully implemented....

2. False Dichotomies
... Meanwhile, as businesses closed and stay-at-home orders rolled out, “we presumed a trade-off between saving lives and saving the economy,” says Danielle Allen, a political scientist at Harvard. “That was foolishness of the most profound degree.” The two goals were actually aligned: Epidemiologists and economists largely agree that the economy cannot rebound while the pandemic is still raging....

Now, as winter looms and the pandemic continues, another dichotomy has emerged: enter another awful lockdown, or let the virus run free. This choice, too, is false... There’s a “whole control panel of dials” on offer, but “it’s hard to have that conversation when people think of a light switch,”

3. The Comfort of Theatricality
Stay-at-home orders saved lives by curtailing COVID-19’s spread, and by giving hospitals some breathing room. But the orders were also meant to buy time for the nation to ramp up its public-health defenses. Instead, the White House treated months of physical distancing as a pandemic-ending strategy in itself. “We squandered that time in terms of scaling up testing and contact tracing, enacting policies to protect workers who get infected on the job, getting protective equipment to people in food-processing plants, finding places for people to isolate, offering paid sick leave … We still don’t have those things,”...
...
The coronavirus mostly spreads through air rather than contaminated surfaces, but many businesses are nonetheless trying to scrub and bleach their way toward reopening. My colleague Derek Thompson calls this hygiene theater... The same charge applies to temperature checks... It also applies to the porous and inefficient travel bans... These tactics might do some good—let’s not conflate imperfect with useless—but they cause harm when they substitute for stronger measures. Theatricality breeds complacency.

4. Personal Blame Over Systemic Fixes
... Without paid sick leave or a living wage, “essential workers” who earn a low, hourly income could not afford to quarantine themselves when they fell ill—and especially not if that would jeopardize the jobs to which their health care is tied....

... News outlets illustrated pandemic articles with (often distorted) photos of beaches, even though open-air spaces offer low-risk ways for people to enjoy themselves. Marcus attributes this tendency to America’s puritanical roots, which conflate pleasure with irresponsibility, and which prize shame over support....

Moralistic thinking jeopardizes health in two ways. First, people often oppose measures that reduce an individual’s risk—seat belts, condoms, HPV vaccines—because such protections might promote risky behavior. During the pandemic, some experts used such reasoning to question the value of masks, while the University of Michigan’s president argued that testing students widely would offer a “false sense of security.”...

Second, misplaced moralism can provide cover for bad policies... Administrators have chastised students for behaving irresponsibly, while taking no responsibility for setting them up to fail...

5. The Normality Trap
In times of uncertainty and upheaval, “people crave a return to familiar, predictable rhythms,” ... In some circles, returning to normal has been valorized as an act of defiance. That’s a reasonable stance when resisting terrorists, who seek to stoke fear, but a dangerous one when fighting a virus, which doesn’t care.

... “If schools are a priority, you have to put them ahead of something. What is that something?” says Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard. “In an ideal world, they would be the last to close and the first to open, but in many communities, casinos, bars, and tattoo parlors opened before them.”...

6. Magical Thinking
... From the start, he and others wondered if hot, humid [summer] weather might curb the spread of COVID-19, as it does other coronavirus diseases. ... But, fueled by shaky science and speculative stories, people widely latched on to seasonality as a possible savior, before the virus proved that it could thrive in the Arizona, Texas, and Florida summer.

... some commentators have argued that the pandemic will imminently fizzle out for two reasons. First, 20 to 50 percent of people have defensive T-cells... Second, some modeling studies claim that herd immunity—... —could kick in when just 20 percent of the population has been infected.
... neither should be grounds for complacency. No one yet knows if the “cross-reactive” T-cells actually protect against COVID-19... Herd immunity, meanwhile, is not a perfect barrier. Even if the low thresholds are correct, a fast-growing and uncontrolled outbreak will still shoot past them...

7. The Complacency of Inexperience
When illness is averted and lives are spared, “nothing happens and all you have is the miracle of a normal, healthy day,” says Howard Koh, a public-health professor at Harvard. “People take that for granted.” Public-health departments are chronically underfunded because the suffering they prevent is invisible....

... By contrast, America’s lack of similar firsthand experience, combined with its sense of exceptionalism, might have contributed to its initial sloppiness...

Even when the virus began spreading within the U.S., places that weren’t initially pummeled seemed to forget that viruses spread. “In April, I was seeing COVID patients in the ER every day,” Karan says. “In Texas, I had friends saying, ‘No one believes it here because we have no cases.’ ... Three months later, Texas and California saw COVID-19 all too closely....

8. A Reactive Rut

In March, Mike Ryan at the World Health Organization advised, “Be fast, have no regrets … The virus will always get you if you don’t move quickly.” The U.S. failed to heed that warning, and has repeatedly found itself several steps behind the coronavirus. That’s partly because exponential growth is counterintuitive... Policy makers end up acting only when it’s too late. Predictable surges get falsely cast as unexpected surprises.

This reactive rut also precludes long-term planning. In April, Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me that “people haven’t understood that [the pandemic] isn’t about the next couple of weeks [but] about the next two years.”

9. The Habituation of Horror

The U.S. might stop treating the pandemic as the emergency that it is. Daily tragedy might become ambient noise. The desire for normality might render the unthinkable normal. Like poverty and racism, school shootings and police brutality, mass incarceration and sexual harassment, widespread extinctions and changing climate, COVID-19 might become yet another unacceptable thing that America comes to accept.

So everyone's all got their panties in a bunch over the whole RBG spot on SCOTUS and Azuma the First has brought up the "What do you want in a Justice" question lately as well. Well, here's my $0.02.

I don't want anyone Trump would be likely to pick. And I sure as fuck don't want anyone Biden would be likely to pick. I do not want a Justice who will rule on any issues the way I think the law (or Constitution) should be written. I don't want a Justice who will take what's good for the government or the nation into account. I don't even want one who will take what's necessary for the government or the nation into account. I want a Justice who will absolutely always rule on the letter of the law, going to the spirit only if there is legitimate (not hairbrained, grasping for any straw) confusion about what the letter of the law actually meant to the authors at the time it was written.

Let's have an example. I don't have issue with the ramifications of Roe v. Wade. It's not an issue I feel I have wisdom enough to have an opinion on. I do, however, have every issue in the world with the legal contortions necessary to render the utterly shittastic and completely unfounded in law ruling. The proper ruling could have either been "Where life begins is for each state to decide," or "Where life begins is for Congress to decide via Amendment". Any other ruling is atrocious and absurd judicial overreach.

I'm probably about the only one who genuinely wants a court who will rule according to the actual law instead of what they think it should be though.

USB Overload: Portwell Motherboard Has 20 USB Ports

Surprisingly, the PEB-9783G2AR supports all 20 of it's USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports natively. That means there are no fancy gizmos like splitters or hubs, so you'll get the full bandwidth of the USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface on all USB ports. Of course, there are compromises; both chipsets support up to eight USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 1, and 4 USB 2.0 ports natively. Presumably, to get to 20 USB ports, Portwell used the chipset lanes dedicated to 6 of the SATA ports and repurposed them to USB ports (there are only two SATA3 ports available).

Portwell positions the motherboard for server and workstation workloads. As such, it comes with an Intel W480E or Q470E chipset that supports 10th Gen Core i7/i5/i3 CPUs, including the 10th Gen Xeon W family of CPUs. However, the board doesn't support all CPUs from the 10th Gen Core and Xeon W Family - you're limited to a peak of 10 cores and an 80W TDP.

>Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
>Filter error: Please take your trolling somewhere else.

Exactly what am gonna do, sorry, but censoring the N* word no matter the context, is, more than the straw breaking the camel's back, a call to devote time to other platforms/tech instead. No bad feelings, this place is home of interesting discussion nonetheless.

Comment enabled (else it won't post, apparently) but won't be read, so don't bother. I'll download my comment history later. Any further message from UID 3902 is a sign of hacked account or onset of dementia.

ATH

I guess most Soylentils by now have their own schtick and perspective by now.

I don't have much to say, but I'm compelled to say it once again.

While it seems to me that the Republicans are far worse in the agenda they're pushing, the Democratic Party is incredibly corrupt and hypocritical.
Both parties are necrotic, rotting corpses of their former selves.

Republicans are the Party of Trump (tm), with no soul or agenda left of their own other than to suck Trumpy Wumpy's 2 inch Trump Tower with vigor, and are complacent and saturated in blame for the numerous abominations this administration has created.

Democrats are pushing an ideology of censorship and groupthink that is cancerous to any democracy, and they are shamefully weak against the greatest national security threat in recent memory: China.
How dare they pretend to care about freedom and liberty while allowing China's evil, black, sticky tentacles to penetrate the country's orifices?

The United States didn't learn from the failure of earlier democracies, mainly Athens. They were only destroyed because they were conquered,
they didn't rot from the inside like Rome did, on which the US is modeled.

I truly do believe that the United States will collapse soon. We have destroyed it.
Some of the founding fathers at least had the wisdom to oppose political parties, but we tossed their advice to the side and now we will suffer the consequences.

But it was doomed from the start, because we are a malevolent, stupid, selfish, irrational, and greedy species, and anything the few who manage to see the light build, will be torn down in time by the unwashed hordes.
I suppose you could fault entropy for that, it's definitely a deeper cause. But the species sure doesn't help.

We're all completely, totally, irrevocably fucked, doomed, screwed, boned.
Whatever party you belong to, you can probably sense it too, the sickening, thick feel that any hope you find for the USA's improvement is dreadfully misplaced.

If I had to choose the point of no return, I would say it happened as soon as Hillary vs Trump became the candidates on the ballot.

Pop open a bottle of Jim Beam and watch the mushroom cloud confetti as our wretched civilization unwinds. I know I'll be celebrating. I'm tired. I think most people are. Silence is the best music.

https://soylentnews.org/~Azuma+Hazuki+2.0/

So someone's registered as "me 2.0" and is trying to mimic my writing style, likely by copying and pasting plus a little modification. Gods, what a lame troll. I'm impressed I get to live in someone's head rent-free like this, but really, how dumb can you get?

Accept no substitutions. Check the username before replying. There is only one of me, and apparently that's already more than some people can handle :)

Belarus repeatedly interrupts at UN amid 'new iron curtain' warnings

Belarus and its allies have repeatedly tried to muzzle speakers at the UN amid warnings of a new iron curtain falling across Europe during an ill-tempered debate on alleged human rights violations.

The body’s 47-member human rights council voted by 23 votes to two with 22 abstentions to adopt a resolution condemning rights violations in Belarus and requesting the UN high commissioner on Human Rights to take up the issue and report back to the council.

The debate was repeatedly interrupted by the Belarus representative, backed by delegates from Russia, China and Venezuela, who tried to limit presentations – including from Alexander Lukashenko’s main election challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, on procedural grounds.

Tikhanovskaya’s short video message had barely begun when the Belarusian representative, Yuri Ambrazevich, demanded it be switched off. He repeatedly interrupted the screening, raising procedural objections and insisting her words had “no relevance on the substance ... on the events that are taking place today”.

He was overruled by the council president, Elisabeth Tichy-Fisslberger.

'Play it down': Trump admits to concealing the true threat of coronavirus in new Woodward book

President Donald Trump admitted he knew weeks before the first confirmed US coronavirus death that the virus was dangerous, airborne, highly contagious and "more deadly than even your strenuous flus,"

[ . . . ] "This is deadly stuff," Trump told Woodward on February 7.

[ . . . ] In a series of interviews with Woodward, Trump revealed that he had a surprising level of detail about the threat of the virus earlier than previously known. "Pretty amazing," Trump told Woodward, adding that the coronavirus was maybe five times "more deadly" than the flu.

[ . . . ] Trump's admissions are in stark contrast to his frequent public comments at the time insisting that the virus was "going to disappear" and "all work out fine."

It must all be fake news and sophistry. Because . . .

The book, using Trump's own words . . .

Ah, there they go again. Using Trump's own words. Shame on them!

AMD Ryzen 4000 ‘Vermeer’ Zen 3 Desktop CPU Lineup Could Feature 10 Core Flavors, New Boost & Infinity Fabric Design

Does this level of granularity make sense in AMD's lineup? Previously, if you wanted more than 8 Zen cores, you went directly to 12.

Here's the Zen 2 launch prices + $1 (July 2019). All of these CPUs have two threads per core:

Ryzen 5 3600 - 6 cores, $200
Ryzen 5 3600X - 6 cores, $250
Ryzen 7 3700X - 8 cores, $330
Ryzen 7 3800X - 8 cores, $400
Ryzen 9 3900X - 12 cores, $500
Ryzen 9 3950X - 16 cores, $750

Two quad-cores, the Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X, were added at $100 and $120 in April 2020.

One "problem" that AMD has is that TSMC yields are "too good". There aren't that many 8-core chiplets with 4 bad cores on them, so they disable perfectly acceptable cores. For lower-core count models, they can lower costs by using a single chiplet. So there's never any reason to make a 6-core with two chiplets, 3 cores enabled on each, because those chiplets could be used in more expensive CPUs with more cores enabled.

The 3300X was distinguished from the 3100 by including all of its 4 cores on a single CCX (half of the Zen 2 chiplet). That improves latency and performance somewhat. With Zen 3, the entire chiplet will be unified (to some extent). Enabling 5 cores on each chiplet may make more sense than it would have with Zen 2. So there's your possibility of a 10-core.

Here's some discussion about it, although it was a couple months before the surprise launch of the Zen 2 quad-cores, which showed that AMD is willing to disable half a chiplet.

If the rumor is correct, AMD can use the 10-core model to push down prices and/or "increase core counts" despite the top model continuing to sit at 16 cores. For example, AMD can slide the 10-core in at $400, knock out a superfluous 6 or 8-core, and lower those prices a bit, while keeping 12-core at $500 and 16-core at $750 (or slightly lower, like $700).

Previously: AMD 2021-2022 Roadmap: Zen 3 Refresh on AM5?

People coin new words all the time. Until the 1920s, the word “geek” referred to a freak who ate live animals. In the ’20s, college students started the freakish act of swallowing live goldfish. America’s anti-intellectuals started calling anyone who held a higher degree, or even read a lot, as a “geek”.
        That, at least, was understandable. It at least made sense. Then in 1954 Theodor Geisel, writing under the pen name Dr. Suess, wrote If I Ran the Zoo. Mr. Geisel made up a lot of words in his childrens’ stories, including the “Grinch,” which became the new “Scrooge”. In If I Ran the Zoo he coined “nerd”, one of the animals in McGrew's zoo.
        A little over a decade later I was in high school, and the epithet I was called was “nerd”, since I was an avid reader who wore glasses with thick lenses. How “nerd" came to be anti-intellectuals’ “smart guy” I have no clue, unless I was the first to be called that name. I find that explanation highly doubtful.
        While I was being called “nerd”, the twentieth century's dumbest word so far was born: Groovy.
        Where did that stupid word come from? Fortunately for me, I never heard that word uttered from any human’s mouth. I suspect that marketers made it up, because I only heard it occasionally in a song lyric (along with a stupid word only heard on the west coast, “gnarly") or, more often, in an advertisement.
        I thought I would never hear a more moronic word than “groovy”. But then, I thought I’d never see a worse president than Carter, until Shrub came along and got us attacked, in two wars, and turned a booming economy and a balanced budget into the worst economy since the Great Depression and the largest budget deficit in history.
        I was proven wrong about “groovy” before the century was out. Some wannabe hipster shortened “web log”, a perfectly logically phrase, to “blog”. Unlike “groovy”, that one stuck. We’re still using that stupid word a quarter of a century later. Once again I thought I would never hear a dumber word, and once again I was proven wrong.
        The marketers came up with BOGO, which indicated that if you buy one item, you get the second one free. “Buy one, get one.” But that is incredibly stupid! If I buy a car, I get one car. If I buy one hamburger, I get one hamburger.
        Now, BOGOF would have sounded just as stupid, but at least it would have had a modicum of logic behind it. BOGO? Brain-dead stupid.
        I hope I don’t live long enough to hear an even dumber word, it was as inevitable as Bush not being the worst president in my lifetime, as Trump has out-incompetented every other president since Eisenhower, the first president I can ever remember, as he was elected when I was six months old.
        If one worse than Trump comes along, our nation is doomed. It's a good thing you can’t say that about your groovy BOGO blog!