Thanks, that's interesting. Sounds good, corporate responsibility.

How is that different from Western countries? They are expected to follow the law, the larger ones have lawyers on hand, and if they don't comply they can be shut down in the worst cases.

You can argue that it's different to have a government appointed compliance officer, but even that happens when companies royally screw up in Europe. The Netherlands recently appointed someone to run NXP, and the UK has been re-nationalizing failing rail franchise businesses.

In some cases they just developed Western university research into actual products, something we should have done but failed to. Some of the battery tech comes to mind.

There was a significant amount of work to develop it into a high end product, but because they had the certainly of long term government support for EVs and battery technology, they threw money at it and engineered solutions.

Many phone manufacturers are now offering updates for longer too. Longevity is definitely becoming a selling point.

Even the best of them only offer about 8 years of support though. To be fair to Microsoft, Windows 11 came out in 2021, and supports most machines up to about 6-7 years old, so they aren't really an outlier. It's just that people expect computers to last longer, which isn't unreasonable. Microsoft used to let you install newer Windows even if it wouldn't work right, so for example I had 10 on a laptop designed for 8, and it was mostly okay but lack of drivers meant power management didn't work right and you couldn't turn the fan off completely.

That's the real change here. You could bodge it before, and now Microsoft is trying to stop you doing that.

Most of the high end stuff comes from China too. Everything from designer handbags to overpriced hifi components to EV drivetrains.

Just because someone slapped a badge on it and a "made in USA" logo doesn't mean most of the work wasn't done in China or some other country from that region. That's literally all they do with a lot of this stuff - sew a brand logo on in Italy, do a final bit of software installation in the US.

If you want crap, try buying a British made car. Nissan do okay because they are Japanese, but most JLR cars are unreliable crap. Notorious for being easy to steal and having expensive mechanical issues.

Doesn't your country have any consumer protection laws?

In the UK the law is that things must last a "reasonable length of time". If you buy expensive and supposedly durable boots and they turn out not to be durable at all, you have legal redress. Additionally, faults that develop within the first 6 months of ownership are by default assumed to be manufacturing defects, unless the manufacturer can prove otherwise.

Panasonic made floppy drives that could store 32MB on a normal high density diskette. Unfortunately it never caught on, as by that point Zip disks were already popular, and they only lasted a few more years due to CD burners being cheap and ubiquitous.

Even Bluray recordable manufacturing is winding down now, unfortunately.

Either way, you really need a 3-2-1 backup strategy. 3 copies, 2 types of media, 1 off site. So both Bluray and cloud.

You can get a USB C to USB A adapter dongle. I know dongles suck, but if you have a particular peripheral you want to use then at least you have the option. Or attach a USB hub with both the keyboard and mouse on it, then you only have one wire to plug in (and in many modern laptops it can charge through that USB C port too).

The Japanese have found a way to use small temperature differences to generate electricity. They use the temperature gradient between shallow and deep sea water, for example.

The key is to use liquids that boil at much lower temperatures to drive the turbines. Of course then you get into difficulty handling those typically quite nasty liquids, but they seem to have made it work and have exported the technology.

It's probably still a bit too new to be of much interest to data centres, but if it keeps ramping up it might one day be useful to them.

They seem to want a balance between domestic consumption and exports, which is sensible. Countries that rely too much on domestic consumption are screwed whenever the domestic economic gets the sniffles. At least with exports the market is diversified, and problems in one part of the world can be somewhat mitigated by opportunities in another.

The main thing we should learn is how effective long term planning and continuity is. It's worst in the US, but some European countries suffer from ever changing direction from government too. Not just on a 4 year election cycle, but on a yearly, even monthly basis in some cases.

There has to be long term stability to drive investment and innovation.

Also at this stage we should just be buying as many solar panels and batteries as we can get, from China and domestic suppliers. Now is not the time to be protectionist, now is the time to address climate change.

Just to pick up on the point about arresting the heads of companies, how many times have people on Slashdot lamented that there is no corporate responsibility in the US? How many times have people said that the CEO should be arrested for some failure that injured thousands or millions of people, some scam that ripped off countless victims but was largely unpunished?

I'm not saying that the arrests in China were legitimate or not motivated by politics, it's just an observation.

Not really. Under communism, the state operates companies for the benefit of the workers, the citizens. Under fascism, the state controls companies to bolster its own power and wealth. Trump is clearly doing the latter.

As an example, the Nazis took effective control of a lot of industry in order to turn it towards the war effort, and supplying slave labour and appointing Nazis to key management positions.

Thanks. I always forget about QNX.