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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I remember reading about it in german media, but you can easily check the votes in the EU gparliament, as they are public. Specifically there’s a nice list of how they voted on that particular issue here (english/reuters). Germany voted “against”.

    Like @barsoap@lemm.ee wrote, the (german) articles mentions fears of “retribution” taxes by the chinese. And when these tarifs were announced/planned, china did immediately say they’d react accordingly (so it’s no an unfounded fear). Another earlier article also mentions “expert opinions” that question benefit for the german car makers due to their large export volume to china (and at least some of them having plants in china making their vehicles, too).

    Now a very recent article from last week notes that the profit of VW-Group has dropped around 31% over last year, and a large part of that is coming from lower sales (and more competition) in China, as well as general restructuring costs. But I have absolutely no idea if the “reverse tariffs” are actually already in place by China, or just planned, or if they reverted their stance. It might also be that they just made independently bad decisions and this is just a consequence of that…

    Edit: corrected some nonsense, oops.





  • Energy got incredibly expensive. I live in a very small, well insulated house (good), but it’s heated with electricity as resistive heat (not good). So no heat pumps (which would be good again).

    I happen to be able to see how much it costs me to heat it. It’s not particularly cold at the moment and it’s between 7 and 10 € every day! So calling it 1000€ for a month in winter isn’t far off.

    Now if you have a larger house, or bad (or even no) insulation, even if you’re heating with some fuel that’s cheaper per kWh, it’ll still add up to at least similar if not higher numbers. Not hard to imagine that’s quickly too much for many people…


  • If you want to get into running a home lab, this world probably be a nice start. So throw proxmox on it and host all the services you want (in containers or VMs). Media server like jellyfin, maybe a nextcloud, storage/Nas services, automate your home with home assistant.

    It has a relatively large amount of memory for that generation of system, but also will probably not exactly sip power for the performance your getting. So if power is expensive where you are, think twice about it.





  • You can still buy them, build a computer with them, and use it, even with windows. Windows supports them just fine. Just oems can’t sell them in a new PC it with windows pre-installed. Used PCs are also fine. You really don’t want a world where you got like 6 versions of a core-i7 in the same store, ranging from 8th generation to 13th, confusing everyone not tech-savvy enough to know (and care) about the difference, so like 95% of people. It also prevents more shady companies from seeking you an old Gen processor, conveniently omitting the details of which generation it is, unless you check the fine print

    There are also inverse market effects to your e-waste argument: if companies keep buying old Gen, CPU manufacturers might not scale up production of new generations because demand on old ones stay high, preventing prices of new gen from coming down due to lack of scale.

    Finally, this practice isn’t new, it’s been like this for literal decades. There was just some very shady “journalism” going on recently, picking up this change and just misreporting it going full “fake news” on the subject. This is basically a follow up on that “wave”.