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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Within the Democratic party, there’s debate about how to handle climate change. There are people who advocate for slow, cautious changes and still see fossil fuels having a small role to play in the future. There are others within the Democratic party that want more drastic action, and make a huge government spending program to try to rapidly move the US energy to renewables (even naming it after one of the biggest US government programs made during the depression). That’s normal politics. And it’s all within the Democratic party.

    The GOP mostly deny climate change exists. A few GOP members suggest that climate change is happening, but is a natural event not caused by man.

    The recent house drama from the speakership battle was caused because 10 nutjobs didn’t want to fund any social programs and wouldn’t approve the budget. Most GOP compromised and made a TEMPORARY budget proposal that the Democratic reps would vote for. This caused the hardliners to remove the speaker. Because he had the audacity to compromise on a TEMPORARY budget.

    Removing policy aside and just looking at behavior, many GOP members do not believe in compromising to get things done. There’s attempts to not hold elected officials accountable (unless they are from the other party). It’s very little cooperation and more retaliation.

    A single GOP senator didn’t like that the US military would reimburse a servicemember’s travel for medical care if they lived in a state where some reproductive treatments weren’t available. This one senator has single-handedly denied 360 military promotions and nominations to military positions. The Senate has historically tried to make it where being the minority party still had some power, so the rules let this happen (the other GOP senators on this committee weren’t blocking, just the one guy).

    The Democratic senators became so fed up they decided to change the rules to prevent a single committee member from blocking promotions. While most GOP senators publicly condemn this guy, many said this rule change was too much. So it looks like the rule change vote will be along party lines, although the #1 GOP senator has said it might be necessary to vote through to get the military back on track.

    The last GOP senator really known for being reasonable and wanting to work collaboratively (McCain) died. He was respected by both parties until Trump came along, and now the GOP don’t really hold his legacy in high regard.

    Sorry, a lot longer than I intended, but it’s a pattern showing no desire to try to govern effectively. Putting all issues of policy aside, I think it’s a bad idea to vote for the GOP.



  • The business strategy decisions behind CPU fab is really interesting over the past 15 years.

    AMD made a budget clone of Intel two decades ago. Then Intel made a misstep and released Northwood Pentium 4. AMD used less power and was faster. And AMD decided to go with DDR memory, while Intel went RDRAM. Then AMD was king when they went AMDx86-64 for 64 bit and Intel went Itanium.

    Then AMD made a huge miscalculation on the future of multicore computing and designed Bulldozer, while Intel got their shit together and went down the hyperthreading route and released CORE/Core2/Core2Duo chips. And Intel was king for a decade.

    I don’t know the exact timing, but AMD needed cash and sold their fabs to raise money, which became TSMC GlobalFoundries, sorry. GF learned how to make stuff small since smartphones became a huge market. Then AMD let an engineer run the company and she invested in the Zen architecture, which could be made by GF with their lessons from the mobile world.

    This is my take. By AMD turning GF loose, GF could date other people work on mobile projects, which helped them learn.

    It’s a side note now, but Intel hung on to their fabs and lagged behind GF. AMD let their fab go and benefitted from it. EDIT: I had some facts wrong. It’s possible Intel fabs are ahead of GF.

    As a side note, Intel did try fairly hard to get into mobile like GF. They had the Atom chips and went for tablet, Ultrabook, netbook, and mobile. I had an ASUS Android phone with an Intel SOC. So it’s not like they ignored mobile, but it didn’t benefit them as much as TSMC.



  • Melting tundra releases methane, accelerating the increase in temperature. Rising temperature reduces polar ice, making oceans absorb more heat, accelerating heating. Climate pattern changes cause more frequent and larger wildfires, accelerating heating.

    There are probably processes that work to reduce heating as it increases that I’m not aware of, but there are a lot of positive feedback processes which is concerning.

    I believe the IPCC 1.5C was criticized because it included effects of a carbon sequestering process that hasn’t been invented yet. That’s pretty optimistic.