Maybe if China was willing to buy anything else but opium, that never would have happened. China's exports were in hot demand and they would only transact in silver but wouldn't buy anything to return that silver supply to global markets. It was causing massive problems in the silver market with over 40% of the yearly global supply going directly to purchasing Chinese exports.

Trade imbalances like that always lead to war. historically.

In that case the solution would be a floating silver price. Was this some kind of currency peg breaking? Ironic really.

Yes, the silver standard was a thing before the gold standard, and those switched back and forth depending on the current gold rush.

Had anyone invented fiat back then? I assumed the concept was more recent.

Data Center and Operations people absolutely are blue collar in attitude and mindset, but you DC folks get to be isolated.

If you're in a working environment that hires SDEs straight out of Tier 1 Universities, start talking about what it's like to grow up poor and you'll see quickly how everyone's eyes glaze over and you get treated like a pariah.

No worries on that front: I grew up dirt poor. Now I’m at a well known HFT firm. I know this quite well. I absolutely don’t belong.

Edit to add: I’m never allowed to forget that I don’t belong.

Had the same experience at an extremely well known hedge fund.

Good luck and keep your head down, but also once you get to a comfortable position, find a good exit.

There are better environments and finance isn't at the top of the pay pyramid anymore.

Kickstarter only voted 97.6% after absolutely bitter internal conflicts and a semi-forced exodus of people who weren't on board with the plan. The in-fighting was extremely bitter, extremely personal, included death-threats and I know several former Kickstarter employees on both sides of that mess who are in therapy over how that all went down.

Were death threats on one side more than the other? If so, which side?

That's not the narrative you should be looking to draw from this.

But with tech unions, situations like the parent's become non-existent because individuals can't negotiate for themselves.

I've been in three different unions in my life. All three exploited me. All three were in the employer's pocket. All three unfairly distributed the work so that the union rep and their friends got the easiest work and the best pay. All three made sure I was paid the minimum.

My computer skills are what finally allowed me to punch my own ticket. I'll be damned if I hand that power back over to someone else.

It's mutual for Americans going the other way and has been for at least the 20 years plus that I've been regularly visiting Canada.

> The US has historically provided between $200m (£155m) and $250m a year in bilateral funding to poorer countries for their work on TB, the World Health Organization said last week, warning that “abrupt funding cuts” would “cripple TB prevention and treatment efforts, reverse decades of progress, and endanger millions of lives”.

> The WHO and UN have set targets of eradicating the disease by 2030, but even before the US aid decision, there was an $11bn shortfall in the global response.

So even without the usaid money, we're still at an $11bn shortfall due to rounding! Nice try, Guardian!

The whole world is shocked and awed that we stopped paying while holding out empty wallets themselves.

The US isn't an empire in decline...it was given away!

My new home page. Love it!

Great lessons to be learned from the Amish. This is basically what they do, just the decision is made as a community rather than per individual.

My memories of RatShack are less fond. #1 place to go to buy batteries that were already dead in the package. Even in the '80s.

Schneider Electric, a French company (owners of APC), absolutely dominates the datacenter infrastructure market at somewhere over 1/3 (probably closer to 1/2) of overall TAM.

EU companies many not be storing the data but they're certainly in the "making shovels" business. And that's kind of the deal. France quietly takes a huge percentage of revenue without most companies being the wiser.

If EU companies start moving their infrastructure elsewhere, I'm sure that American datacenter/cloud companies will reconsider who they buy their racks, PDUs, etc, from.