Yeah, I believe so based on what I saw from affar, but I’m more intimatelly familiar with Britain - especially the more subtle elements of politics and policy - since I lived there from before the Crash until Brexit.

They’re the most successful Fascists at the moment and in parts of Europe have massive influence because they’re often supported by those amongst the power-hungry rich people who happen to be Jewish. This helps further normalized the tools of Autoritarianism in the countries were they have influence.

(For avoidance of doubt I’m not saying "Rich = Jewish, I’m saying “Very Rich Jewish = Very Rich Non-Jewish = Fascist Supporting”)

Mind you, I myself think Neoliberals are far more guilty of pushing for the implementation of tools of Authoritarianism in Europe than Zionists, mainly because Neoliberalism is an anti-Democracy ideology (it desires that the State - which is what is controlled by the voters - does not exerce its power in those domains that matter the most for Money - the neolibs call it “interfere in the Market” - i.e. for that which the vote controls to be a power second to Money, or in other words, make the power of voters secondary, the opposite of Democracy).

Whilst Propaganda is the primary Neoliberal tool of control, Surveilance is the second one and Force Disguised As Fair and Legitimate (i.e. as “Justice”) is next, which is how we end up with Chat-Control, insanelly overbroad Anti-Terrorism Legislation and Anti-Demonstration Legislation.

But yeah, there is reason to believe that the influence of Zionism in Europe mainly via the subset of the Jewish People here who are pro-Fascism, has probably helped a bit the expansion of authoritarianism in Europe.

I just want to inject here my experience in Britain during the 2008 Crash and its aftermath:

In Britain, the Finance Industry was 17% of GDP, so when the Crash happened the country was disproportionally hit.

After the crash the autorities chose to protect Asset Owners above all:

• Interest rates were lowered to 0%, thus protecting lenders (i.e. those with the money to lend or ownership of Banks which in the modern system can de facto create money: if you don’t believe me, read the paper “Money Creation In The Modern Economy” from the Bank Of England) from debt defaults, also indirectly protecting Asset Owners by avoiding asset firesales from collateral confiscated after a default thus avoiding the associate asset price falls, most notably for Land and Housing (in the UK the Housing bubble never really stopped being inflated and Land Ownership is the core of Old Wealth)
• Banks were unconditionally saved by the state taking a share in them. That Public share was then put under management of a group made up of bankers “so that the government doesn’t interfere in the market”. De facto pressure for changing from the very practices that had cause the Crash was removed and most of the people having the blame for the failures of the Crash kept their positions of privilege.
• All this was paid by most people through Austerity. Public services were cut, Social Security (aka "Benefits) were reduced, salaries stagnated. The poorer one was the worst they got hit.

By 2015 the incomes of the top wealthier 10% of the population were growing in real terms 23% per year whilst the bottom 90% were seeing their incomes fall 1% per year in real terms.

This was roughly how things went for about a decade after the Crash. UK inequality is nowadays huge, social mobility near non-existent, average incomes when measured in a currency other than the pound - which went down following Brexit - have stagneted, overall economic growth is anemic and concentrated in highest wealth layers since that “growth” told by official GDP numbers is mostly asset prices going up.

This is the process by which the billionaires make sure they win: everybody gets hit more or less in a Crash, but in during the subsequent period when the state is supposedly trying to fix it, you get also sorts of “extreme measures required by extreme times” that, “curiously”, help the billionaires the most, so some years later everybody but the wealthiest slices of society are worst of whilst the wealthiest are much richer even than before the Crash.

I expect the plans of the billionaires who are cozying up with Trump is exactly to end up richer via this process.

A lot of countries in Europe already have their own country-wide payment systems.

What we’re seeing now in Europe is the stage where those multiple country-specific systems become interoperable and a new international payment system appears.

Canada only needs the kind of thing which has been not just available but actually dominant for decades in countries like The Netherlands and Portugal.

At least in Europe housing is at the moment proportionally to incomes just as bad as in the US.

Totally agree on Health, though.

Having lived in a couple of countries in Europe, from The Netherlands which has Proportional Vote system and a thus a multitude of small parties to Britain with a First Past The Post system like the US and thus pretty much a Two Party System, I’ve concluded that at least in Politics stability is just like standing water - it invariably turns into a swamp.

We need some amount of constant change to bring up and flush out the rot that innevitably accumulates in the murky waters of a system were power is always in the hands of a subset of people who are all in the same social circles, went to the same schools and whose sons and daughters marry each other.

Not “Daily Revolution”, just regular change so that any funny business going on outside the public eye risks being brought to light, destroyed and the guilty people punished because power has changed has to people who aren’t mates of the crooks that did it.

Oh yeah, I got it.

Those people are people like my parents, my uncles and aunts.

The thing is, from my own experience being involved in a small leftwing party in Portugal and with my own family, it’s pretty much only those who were politically aware back in Fascist days (and Fascism had things like Censorship, so most people were not politically aware and thought of Fascism that “it’s the way things are”) that still hold strong to traditional Leftwing values. Further, the level of Education of people seems to be positivelly correlated with how much they understand and value Democracy, and back in the days of Fascism most people were either illiterate or had about 4 years schooling as that was the mandatory level of schooling until the late 60s.

Meanwhile young people’s politics are the product of growing up during the Neoliberal era, with no real strong well structured ideologies beyond Neoliberal-Capitalism providing a framework of thinking and policy making and instead with tactical, one-problem-at-a-time, “moderate” politics with no clear vision for the future or strategy, so they don’t really have top-down thinking hence even their Principles are easilly misdirected and subverted (such as how the fight for Equality For All has been transformed by Neoliberalism into a “divide and conquer” version were people are grouped by characteristics they were born with and then treated as differently deserving of their “equality” being fought for depending on such characteristics - so, an unequal form of equality, thus not really Equality - which very purposefully avoids talking about the greatest inequality of all - Wealth Inequality - and is called Identity Politics).

So yeah, the old guezers still in leftwing parties whose political awareness came during Fascist days plus quite a bunch more of their age cohort are still a strong bullwark against Fascism, but party of those people have already been converted towards Fascist ideas (mainly because of immigration, as Portugal used to be an incredibly uniform country and in maybe 2 decades immigrants became almost 10% of population, which is extra hard to older people who grew up in those days when everybody shared the same cultural background are thus are nowhere as socially and culturally flexible) whilst the younger generations often think Neoliberal Capitalism “is the way things are” since that’s all they’ve known their whole lives and even the ones with Leftwing principles, having confused messaging pushed by the not-quite-as-righting neoliberals from places like the US and UK with leftwing ideas and are busy pushing the divisive “Equality” of Identity Politics that pits parts of the Left against other parts of the Left AND against the mainstream depending on which Identitarian Group they feel should be more protected which fuels the kind of environment were Fascists can pedle their ideals (the subject immigration has been especially useful for Fascists in this, especially given that as studies have shown Immigration lowers salaries for unspecialized occupations, which is exactly were the poor and the poorest working class sits, so they’re naturally drawn to anti-immigration discourse).

TL;DR

In summary:

• Only the old people with higher education and political awareness dating back to Fascist days still hold strong against Fascism.
• Most old people have low education or did not have political awareness back then. They’re also naturally inflexible and have trouble dealing with things like the rise of multi-culturalism from immigration so more easilly fall prey to people preaching a return to the “old days”.
• Young people whilst having much higher levels of formal education know nothing else but Neoliberal Capitalism. Even those who have leftwing principles usually follow political frameworks from anglo-saxon countries which are de facto not leftwing (i.e. not seeking pure “Equality For All”) and instead are divisive equality-but-not-equally constructs which naturally pit some people against other people purelly based on genetic characteristics they were born with or the geographical location of their birth, thus both dividing the left AND at the same time antagonizing the poorest segments the many since the “groups” those liberals-thinking-they’re-lefties fight for are minorities hence by definition “the few” and they don’t fight as hard, if at all, against that which plagues the weakest amongst the majority - wealth inequality.

So the bullwark against Fascism was never as strong as it might seem, is naturally eroding as those people die and due to imported supposedly “leftwing” political frameworks which are really just a Neoliberal perversion of core Leftwing ideals it’s not actually being rebuilt but actually is being eroded even faster.

(Most of that 50 year extra period after Fascism for countries like Italy and Germany over countries like Portugal, Spain and Greece was during a time were the Leftwing was far more effective and created things like universal healthcare, universal education and social security, things which generally have been slowly destroyed in the last 4 decades)

IMHO, just like American-style “Liberals” are de facto facilitators of Fascism, the ideas they have exported during their period of cultural dominance in the West are also weaking the capability of being a bullwark for Fascism of the newer Leftwing generations elsewere.

A lot of countries in Europe have widely used country-specific payment systems.

The problem is those which don’t as well as the system of one country not being usable in other European countries so it falls back to VISA or Mastercard to use your card when abroad or for online purchases from businesses based in other countries.

I wouldn’t be so sure.

Look at Germany, not just the obvious part with AfD but also the unwavering support for a certain middle-eastern nation dominated by an extremely racist ethno-Fascist ideology whilst they were committing Genocide in Gaza.

(Also look at Italy which currently has a far-right government).

Given enough time that protection against a certain kind of authoritarianism because of a nation having been through it, fades away.

Unlike in Germany were it was foreigners that kicked the Fascists out, in Portugal it was actually the Portuguese that freed themselves from Fascism, so hopefully that protection will last a bit longer in Portugal.

I think it’s a very important power relative to all the powers he has, but that’s mainly because he has so little power and is mainly just the top diplomat of the nation.

But yeah, he can’t solve Portugal’s problems, not even close.

That’s my point - it makes sense for high demand for GPUs and RAM to leak into lower supply and hence higher price for other high density microchips that use the same process and are made in the same fabs - something which your experience seems to confirm - but HDDs are mechanical magnetic storage devices were the only microchip is a pretty basic controller.

HDDs are about as related to GPUs and RAM as power sources.

Yeah, well, in the first round of the Presidential Elections the Fascist candidate had the 2nd largest number of votes and the one from the Hard Neoliberal Party (who in their early days wanted to privatize the National Health Service until they discovered that was incredibly unpopular) had the 3rd largest number of votes.

The Revolution was over 50 years ago and a lot of people have forgotten how things used to be before that or simply don’t value genuinely Leftwing conquests like the National Health Service and Universal Education (which have been slowly undermined in the last 2 decades or so) from the short post-revolution power period when Leftwing ideals were much more dominant (before things slid into the “2 main parties dominance” system that voting systems with electoral circles and no proportional vote invariably create).

He can refer to the Constitutional Court any legislation coming from Parliament that he thinks might be unconstitutional.

This is important because Justice in Portugal is slow as shit (really, truly, world-beating, stupidly slow) so rather than some unconstitutional shit (probably designed to make some well-connected fatcats even richer) actually coming into effect as Law and spending 10+ years fucking people’s lives whilst it gets challenged in court and works its way up to the top court of the land with the Government spending taxpayer’s money to doggedly defend it all the way until that court finally throws it down, it can go directly from Parliament to the President to that court before it ever affects anybody’s life.

(Having lived in Britain which has no written Constitution, I have learned to value having a Constitution as a second line of defense against political abuse by parties which with a minority of cast votes have parliamentary majorities because the voting system is some undemocratic shit that does not give the same weight to all votes rather than Proportional Vote)

Personally, even though the President has flashier powers such as being able to bring down a government, I think that this specific more technical power of referring legislation directly to the Constitutional Court before it becomes the Law in effect can be far more important in terms of impact in people’s lives, especially in this day and age when politics is pretty crooked and money-driven.

The guy who just got elected, even though he hails from one of the two mainstream parties which have dominated politics in Portugal almost since the start of Democracy in 74 and are pretty rotten, comes from a faction of that party which is actually left of center and is not connected with the crooks that led that party for that last 2 decades, so I have great hopes that he will be more consistent than the last one in using these less flashy powers to stop the kind of unconstitutional shit that screws the many for the good of a few that the neo-liberals who dominate those mainstream parties have often pushed in the last 3 or 4 decades.

Punched Paper Quantum AI is the next Revolution in Computing!

You heard it here first.

Invest Now!!!

Unless things have changed recently LLMs don’t really used slow data stores with very high capacity such as HDDs, at least not beyond the training stage.

The prices that have been pushed up by AI are for GPUs and DRAM (price rises which in turn possibly feed onwards to other kinds of chip done in the same kind of fab), whilst this stuff is magnetic data storage on movable disk plates, a very different tech.

I expect these things at most will only be affected in price very indirectly (for example, if memory prices go up because of all the datacenters targetting AI applications, there might be fewer datacenters set up for other kinds of server side application which are more data-centric, which would impact demand for ultra high-capacity HDDs).

Not that it makes much of a difference to us run-of-the-mill techies as consumers - even if HDDs get cheaper, with many times more expensive GPUs and RAM we can hardly put together new systems using these things, so at best it might just get a bit cheaper to expand one’s large storage NAS (the slower kind just storing data that doesn’t get accessed often, as the other kind uses SDDs).

Yeah, that quoted statement definitly sounds like a massive cope for a profound feeling of emptiness and/or inedequacy.

Whilst my point about The Guardian still stands, it’s a well known saying that the greatest enemy of the Left is the Left :/

The Guardian is very openly pro-Lib Dem, actively participated in the slander campaign against Corbyn including the one where a Jewish Holocaust Survivor was deemed an anti-semite to try and taint Corbyn by association and its columnists very openly say of themselves as being “Opinion Makers”.

These people are the very opposite of a trustworthy and unbiased news source when it comes to left-wing politics in Britain, with the notable exception of Monbiot and Owen Jones.

Sourcing your “information” about internals of left-wing parties from traditionally propagandist hard-neoliberal news media is almost as bad as sourcing it from fascist tabloids.

It could be either way.

In a for profit setting when those who do the work are the very same people/institutions who measure the quality of that work (in this case schools which both teach something and then measure how well that something was taught), it’s not at all uncommon that the measuring methodology gets changed over time to yield better results for the same work rather than the work changing to improve the results in the existing measurement methodology.

This is why independent measuring of results is a thing.

In this case to know for sure we would have to get the opinions of existing medical practicioners who have worked side by side with recent graduates from these and other schools - if they tend to see graduates from these schools as coming in worse prepared than those from other schools, then this outcome we saw is probably due to the kind of situation I described above.

Every accusation [is] a confession

That is indeed something which has been very visibly and very often proven, again and again and again, in the last couple of years.

I reckon it was always so, but we just forgot it during the period after WWII and the ressurging of the far-right.