Birthright citizenship is an absolutely stupid idea.

It’s no more stupid than citizenship by descent. Why should someone get citizenship just because of the citizenship of their parents? Shouldn’t they have to live in the country? Shouldn’t they speak the language? Shouldn’t they go through the country’s school system?

Europe’s combination of freedom of movement and only Jus Sanguinis has resulted in a situation where there are lots of people with citizenship to a place they’ve never lived, and no citizenship to the place they’ve lived their entire lives.

Really though, how citizenship should be awarded depends on if it’s an obligation or an opportunity. If a country is at war and drafting all citizens of a certain age, citizenship is an obligation the state puts on its citizens. If a country is at peace and provides a social safety net to all citizens, citizenship is an opportunity for its citizens. If the world were fair, people would be able to choose whether or not they wanted citizenship when they reached adulthood. It shouldn’t be something that happened automatically to children based either on who their parents were or on where they were born.

They just elected Claudia Sheinbaum, who is seen as being extremely close to the outgoing president AMLO. Some people were suggesting that she was so close to him that it was really his way of getting another term as president, similar to how Putin stepped down as president of Russia to become PM while Dmitry Medvedev became president in name only.

How true is that? It’s hard to say. My guess is that a lot of it is sexism, thinking that a woman can’t think for herself and a woman president will turn to someone else for the important decisions.

But, it’s true that under AMLO, there was a lot of democratic backsliding in Mexico. OTOH, Mexico has been dominated by PAN and PRI for decades. In fact, PRI won 14 elections in a row between 1928 and 1994. It wasn’t until Vincente Fox in 2000 that PAN was even a factor. So, there’s a lot of the power structures in Mexico geared towards supporting PRI and PAN.
They were probably undermining a lot of the things AMLO wanted to accomplish. If he had followed all the rules and norms he might not have been able to accomplish anything because the establishment would have blocked everything he tried to do. That doesn’t excuse his rule and law breaking, but it does contextualize it.

We’ll see what happens with Sheinbaum. I, for one, am fucking thrilled that Mexico’s president has a PhD in energy engineering. The fact she’s a woman is also historical, but to me the doctorate is more important.

It’s pretty telling about how much Americans know about other countries that the assumption is that Jus Soli is the norm.

Depending on what happens with GPUs for datacenters, external GPUs might be so rare that nobody does it anymore.

My impression right now is that for nVidia gamer cards are an afterthought now. Millions of gamers can’t compete with every company in Silicon Valley building entire datacenters stacked with as many “GPUs” as they can find.

AMD isn’t the main choice for datacenter CPUs or GPUs. Maybe for them, gamers will be a focus, and there are some real advantages with APUs. For example, you’re not stuck with one particular amount of GPU RAM and a different amount of CPU RAM. Because you’re not multitasking as much when gaming, you need less CPU RAM, so you can dedicate more RAM to games and less to other apps. So, you can have the best of both worlds: tons of system RAM when you’re browsing websites and have a thousand tabs open, then start a game and you have gobs of RAM dedicated to the game.

It’s probably also more efficient to have one enormous cooler for a combined GPU and CPU vs. a GPU with one set of heatsinks and fans and a separate CPU heatsink and fan.

External GPUs are also a pain in the ass to manage. They’re getting bigger and heavier, and they take up more and more space in your case. Not to mention the problems their power draw is causing.

If I could get equivalent system performance with an APU vs. a combined CPU and GPU, I’d probably go for it, even with the upgradeability concerns. OTOH, soldered-in RAM is not appealing because I’ve upgraded my RAM more often than other components on my PCs, and having to buy a whole new motherboard to get a RAM upgrade is not appealing.

The Crypto to AI transition was brutal. Just as demand for GPUs was coming down because people were starting to use ASICs to mine Bitcoin, along comes AI to drive up non-gaming demand again.

The only good news is that eventually when the AI bubble pops there will be massive R&D and manufacturing geared towards producing GPUs. Unless something else comes along… But really, I can’t see that happening because the AI bubble is so immense and is such an enormous part of the entire world’s economy.

Why do you need all those things to be in one single app?