Monthly Archives: April 2024

Correction

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In one of my previous articles I wrote something that started bothering me the moment I wrote it, and it still does.

It was the statement that, essentially, Putin is on God’s side. It was meant as a simplification, but I feel it is so inherently false I cannot justify it. I succumbed to an obvious fallacy, whereby if one side is obviously satanic and villainous, as America and the vassal West obviously are, and the other side is apparently virtuous, as Russia is, the virtuous side must have some connection to God, or at least in some way strive towards God. I don’t see that. It’s a fallacy to assume that if one side is evil, their enemy must have transcendental inclinations. What I see in Putin is a desire to restore the good parts of the past, and use them as a foundation for building a better future. If anything, he sees God in a materialistic way, as something that is good for the society, in service of a new and better Russia, but wanting to benefit from God is very far from being in service of God.

Neither Russia nor China are anything more than “normal countries”, in a sense that they are not infected by whatever mental illness it is that is devouring the West. Even that might be an overstatement, having in mind the similarities in totalitarian response to the American bioweapon, and Russian reluctance to divest itself from the Western fiat monetary system.

So, while I might cheer for them when they oppose a clear evil, thinking we are on the same side would be deluding myself. Both worldly sides are much more similar to each other than they are to me. They both see their future in this world and in worldly terms, while I see my future only in the context of God, and I barely hold on to this world as it is. Stating that Putin is on God’s side just because I cheer for him in his fight against the obvious evil of America, was obviously a mistake, and I renounce it.

Thoughts about computers

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I’ve been thinking about computers lately, for multiple reasons, so I’ll share a few thoughts.

It’s interesting how people tend to have weird prejudice about things based on the label. For instance, “gaming” computers are supposedly not “serious”, you shouldn’t buy that stuff if you’re doing serious work with your computer. You should get a “business” or a “workstation” machine.

That’s such incredible nonsense, because what does “gaming” even mean at this point? It’s basically “workstation” with RGB lights. If a PC or a laptop is “gaming”, it usually means a powerful graphics card, overbuilt power supply, high-performance cooling system, and generally high-end components designed to be able to work on 100% indefinitely. What’s a workstation PC? Well, it has a powerful GPU, overbuilt power supply, high performance cooling, high-spec components that are designed to be able to work on 100% indefinitely, only the graphics card has drivers for CAD, which means it supports double precision floating point arithmetics, and it’s designed more “seriously”, which means no RGB and the box looks normal, and not like an alien space ship with glowing vents. It’s also more expensive, in order to milk the “serious” customers for money, which means that if you want to have the greatest performance for your money, get gaming components, get a normal-looking case, turn off the RGB nonsense and there you go. The only situation where you would actually want a real workstation machine is if you’re running server workloads and you actually need a server CPU. Otherwise, “gaming” translates into “great for photo and video editing and programming”.

It’s interesting that everything that tends to be labelled as “business” tends to be shit. That’s because a computer for “business” is the cheapest possible piece of crap that will still work, so penny-pinchers that buy equipment for general staff that slaves their lives away in cubicles for a meager wage can feel good knowing they spent the least possible amount of money on the “workforce”. That’s never the computer the boss is getting for himself. He’s getting a 16” Macbook Pro. He’s certainly not getting the “business” model. You don’t get a business-grade computer if you’re doing business, you get it if you are considered to be equipment required for doing business, and you need to be cheap.

There’s also the question whether to buy a Mac or a “PC”, as if somehow a Mac is not a PC. Let me write down my own experience. I used to write books on IBM T41 laptops running Linux. The keyboards were great, and the screen had lots of vertical space, being 4:3 ratio, so that worked fine, but they tended to die on me, because I used them on my lap, and I didn’t have air conditioning in the room so they overheated during the summer; the motherboards would die, so I would just get another used T41 (they were several generations obsolete and dirt cheap at that point), put in my hard drive and continue writing. At some point, after I went through two IBMs in two years, I decided I had enough of that shit and got a 13” Macbook Air. Now, that thing was indestructible, a proverbial cockroach that would survive a nuclear war. I had to retire it because it had only 2GB of RAM and became unbearably slow after five or so years of use, and traded it in for some new piece of hardware, but there’s obviously a reason why so many people buy Macbooks, and it’s not because they are stupid so they buy “overpriced junk”. If anything, the old Thinkpads were junk compared to the Macbook. I replaced the Air with a mid-2015 15” Pro, which is also a cockroach – I’m using it to write this, it’s 8 years old, I more-less retired it a few years ago and still works just fine. The screen, touchpad and keyboard are still great, but it’s significantly slower than the modern machines, so I wouldn’t do serious heavy lifting on it, but for all the normal tasks it’s just fine. The only interventions I did on it was to change a bloated battery when it was 5 years old, and I replaced the 256GB SSD with a 1TB Samsung. So, my answer to “why would you buy a Mac” is “because I want it to work reliably and well until it’s a million generations obsolete and I want to replace it anyway”. It doesn’t just die, the user interface is great, and it’s usually among the fastest machines you can get, and considering how well it works and how long it lasts, it’s dirt cheap. The only exception are the generations with the touchbar and butterfly keyboard. They were shit, and everybody who got one regrets their decisions.

It’s not that I have some general recommendation, such as “just get a Mac” or “just get a gaming machine”. In fact, it is my experience that, today, the computers are so good you really have many good options, but that’s only if you avoid the “economy” and “business” stuff, which is what junk made of obsolete components sold to businesses at clearance prices is called.

Gold price rise

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Gold has been growing lately, and the question some people ask is whether it’s time to sell because it might crash.

That logic might have made sense in the past, but I don’t think it does now. Let me explain.

First of all, gold didn’t even catch up to inflation yet. The commodities such as olive oil went up 2x and I don’t see anybody expecting it to come down. However, the more important reason why people expect it to crash is the expectation that the Americans control the gold price in order to prop up the dollar, and since they are still in power, the expectation is that they will manage to crash the gold just because they always do.

The problem with this logic is that the dollar, at this point, is the world’s hottest hot potato. Everybody who has it is trying to get rid of it, because America is using it as a weapon.

China, in particular, invented a very good method of simultaneously getting rid of their dollar reserves and buying all the dumped gold from the West, and it’s so elegant I’m amazed that the Russians didn’t think of it. You see, all the Chinese did was set the gold price on the Shanghai exchange $100 above what they sell it for in London. As a result, everybody wanting to earn a quick profit will buy gold in the West and sell it in China for more money. If the West wants to dump gold to prop up the dollar, they can feel free, but everybody will quickly scoop it up and sell it in China, thus pumping the Western gold to China and Chinese dollar reserves to the West. As a result, this makes China more resistant to Western financial pressures, prepares it for a future where all the currencies are either gold backed or irrelevant, and depletes the Western gold reserves. If the West tries to counter this by raising the price of gold, it will actually increase the buying pressure because the retail buyers might smell the coffee and jump on the hype train. If they prohibit sales of gold for dollars, it’s the end of the dollar. The beauty of the thing is that they can’t even prohibit China from buying up their gold, because formally speaking it’s not China doing it, it’s everybody who wants to make money on the Shanghai exchange.

So, I guess if you think gold will crash, just because it always did, I would say you don’t understand what’s going on in the world. What’s going in the world is the end of America, the end of Dollar, and the return of gold as money. No, Bitcoin is not the new gold. Gold is the new gold, and the fact that the central banks are the ones buying most of it at this time, and the fact that the retail buyers don’t get it yet, means that you will either have gold, or you will be bankrupt.

How do I know that this present gold price rise is not a retail phenomenon? Because you can go to your local bullion dealer and buy pretty much whatever you want. When it’s a retail phenomenon, everything instantly vanishes from the shelves, because the supply of retail products is very limited, being tailored for the normal levels of demand.

Also, according to my estimates, gold is still super cheap considering where it will be soon. That’s why the Chinese can put the price at +$100 over spot; it’s because where spot is. They don’t think they are losing money doing it, they think it’s the best deal ever.