Chinese companies will finance it because it's a matter of national security, because the Chinese government backs their efforts, and because the potential pay-off is huge.

There are already Chinese DRAM manufacturers doing reasonably well in the embedded/mobile space. This has been brewing for years.

It might not matter in 10 years. Peolpe are already importing Chinese tractors because they are simple and easy to maintain, and decent quality. Depending on how protectionist the US remains, in 10 years the market may look very different.

It seems like there is an obvious business opportunity for a domestic tractor manufacturer here. Anyone care to explain why nobody has moved into this market?

Months to the moon would be useful if the mass was decent. Micro sats are the obvious choice, but even if they could very slowly move a lander there, the transit time isn't a big deal.

This is missing the point. You want to see those brands, copy the image they used, and search for that on AliExpress. Then you can buy the same thing for 10% of the Amazon price.

You may not get the same warranty support etc. but when you are paying just 10% you can afford a few misses and still come out way, way on top.

Maybe they plan to push off the Earth's magnetic field and then very very slowly drift to Mars.

That bit sounds daft, but for boosting satellites in orbit it makes much more sense.

Getting to Mars though... As it gets further from Earth, the magnetic field weakens, and it's not very strong to start with. The acceleration in orbit is going to be small. Maybe if you can take a century to get to Mars it might be feasible.

You can't win.

If they never add or change features, the OS gets stale fast. New a new graphics API to support raytracing? Sorry, wait for the next OS version. Fixed broken behaviour that you were relying on? No! You changed my OS! Didn't fix broken behaviour? No! You shipped buggy crap!

Release a new OS every year to compensate? No! I want a stable OS that is supposed for 10+ years (Windows standard support lifetime).

Switch to Linux? "Long Term Support" that is only 5 years and doesn't actually fix broken stuff anyway. Systemd. Separate Proton release cycle.

It sucks but nobody has come up with a better solution yet.

They can probably live with lower efficiency because they have so much cheap energy.

They over-spent during the pandemic, and because AAA games take so long and so much money to develop now, by the time they reached the market the bubble had already burst.

They are all focused on online subscription/micro transaction stuff as well now, which is why you see games being withdrawn a week after launch when it becomes clear they aren't the next big cash cow. The same as Netflix cancels shows days after release because the initial viewing figures are enough to know that they aren't the next Squid Game.

There is also a lot more competition. So many indie games now, most of which gain barely any traction because nobody even knows about them in a sea of thousands of others. Mobile games as well, all competing for attention.

Samsung may come to regret it when it allows Chinese manufacturers to become familiar brands to consumers and take a big chunk of that market.

Yeah, it could just be gouging.

AI is a gift for the Chinese. Even if their DRAM and AI training chips and GPUs aren't top tier, because of AI making everything else unobtainable, people will buy it.

The high prices mean they don't have to have small margins either, so there is more to invest back into R&D.

In the UK it's a mixture of Russia bots and the far right, mostly.

If only adults would. What we really need is a ban on Facebook. It's the adults on there that need protecting.