"China has been taking out massive amounts of money & wealth from the U.S. in totally one-sided trade, but won't help with North Korea. Nice!"

the cluelessness is really overwhelming. but, as i mentioned months ago, the masses connect to this for the precise reason that it's a repetition of the propaganda that is designed for them - because he gets his information from the same sources.

it's less that he's stupid and more that he's brainwashed.

the guy is truly the bleater in chief.

baaaaaaa. baaaaaaaaa.

all he knows is what fox news told him.

what's the truth, here?

1) north korea is not an independent actor, and it's leadership does not make autonomous decisions. it is entirely dependent on everything from the chinese.
2) so, when the koreans grit their teeth like this, it is not because the chinese "won't help". it's a chinese tactic. the chinese are telling them to do this.
3) on the chess board, korea is a stalemate. there is no way forwards. nuclear weapons do not alter the character of the situation. that river is off limits from the chinese perspective. it was off limits 50 years ago, and it was off limits 500 years ago and it will be off limits 500 years from now. so, there is nothing that the americans can do without launching a war against the chinese.

when the north koreans pull it out and start swinging it around like this, it is always and only to create a distraction from other regional issues. right now, it seems like the chinese are trying to create a distraction in korea so that they can continue expanding, unmolested, in the south china sea.

the reason the americans always fall for it is that the potential for a threat is too great to ignore, even if it isn't actually real. this is an aspect of the stalemate: the americans can neither ignore the situation, nor can they ever resolve it.

if trump were going to carry through with the shift in policy that others have hoped he would carry through with, the solution would be to break the stalemate by withdrawing - to call the chinese bluff. he won't do this, though - because he's been brainwashed by hannity like all the other fucking sheep have been and is just as clueless as the rest of the idiots are.

if you're really a liberal, you're going to argue that political correctness is not important to you. and i will probably agree with you if you make that argument: this is wrong, but it's not important.

if you're ranting and railing against it, you're a racist. and i will not agree with you at all, if you make this argument: this is wrong, and it's very important.

this is consolidated: youtube, bandcamp, blogspot. i've shut down the delicious link dump, as it's superfluous after the move to blogspot and it was pushing ads in the feed (gross). i'm on the brink of closing down soundcloud, i just need to clear it out first. it's full of spam, because you have to pay to turn the comments off. facebook uses a proprietary feed algorithm, so they've been excluded by choice (that's just another reason to not use facebook). i would also like to add disqus, but they don't support this, either. i'm going to keep an eye out for a comment system that allows for rss and i'll no doubt use it exclusively if it presents itself. in the mean time, this is as much as i can put together in one place.

http://www.rssmix.com/u/8219212/rss.xml

what i'm wondering in the short-run is if i can convert one of these 250 gb drives into a pagefile. it would not be as fast, of course. but, it might potentially let me run a sampler.

this is entirely theoretical, right now: i haven't *actually* had an issue with a sampler that i can't resolve with the existing set-up. it's just that i see where the push factor is, and what's going to eventually force me to upgrade, one day. i'm going to eventually need more ram and have no choice...

as mentioned elsewhere, the only wall i've had to scale or think i will ever need to scale is in ram. the newer vst sample plugin libraries want 16+ gb of ram, and i'd need to get to 64-bit to do it. that's a potential driver nightmare. it's likely workable, i just don't want to do it until i have to.

i'd have to reimage, to start with. it took a long time to build that image, and i don't want to even think about it. but, i'd certainly use 64-bit xp, fwiw. there's no benefit in upgrading; i just keep the machine offline.

again: i didn't buy this to increase speed. the machine is already blazing fast, because it's very well maintained (software. not hardware.). i bought it because i needed more storage space. and, that's the only change i'm expecting - more storage space.

there are currently 3 250 gb hdds in there. i bought it with four. it's split into a lot of partitions, including a 50 gb C: drive. one of the drives is solely for music, and that won't change. what i'm going to do is combine a lot of the smaller partitions together into a larger "discography" partition that will utilize the entire 2 TB drive. this will include things like wavs for burning cds and isos for burning dvds and blu-rays, as well as all of my source material, organized in iso files. so, it's all data storage.

as i move things to the new drive, it will open up space on the old drives. so, the remaining partitions (the virtual machine partition, the temp partition, the install script partition) will be able to grow. extra temp space will be useful, but it's otherwise not going to be much of a change.

actually, you know what? this is a moot point.

i'm not replacing my system partition; that is, my C: drive will remain on an older drive.

the new drive will neither launch the os, nor launch programs, nor do anything else that would be faster over ssd. it will simply store data.

i really just needed a lot more space.

so, why is my machine such a fast boot and yours so slow?

well, it's 32-bit. my hardware specs are pretty much maxed for 32-bit. but if you're running 64-bit then yours might be better. if you have an old machine, you know it. it's probably not why.

the reason is probably that i keep my software footprint to a bare minimum. i run regular scripts to clear out caches. nothing loads on start-up - not even backup services. and, the machine has xp on it.

i'm not disputing the premise. but, if i got a 25% increase in speed from an ssd, that would take my start-up time from ten seconds to 7.5 seconds. it would take my cubase launch time from 20 seconds to 15 seconds.

it hardly seems like it's worth the price, and the associated risk of using volatile storage on a system with very, very high data transfer rates.

what i needed was a lot of safe, permanent storage space. integrity. longevity. size. speed was not in the list of things that are of concern to me.

fwiw, my machine boots in seconds, anyways. it's about a ten second boot-up. you read through reviews of ssds and it's things like:

outlook launches in less than 30 seconds

dude. i don't run outlook, but it would be launching in less than 30 seconds on my machine, trust me. cubase takes about 20 seconds to launch.

if your machine takes more than 30 seconds to launch fucking outlook, you need more than a solid state drive. you need ram. you need a faster cpu. and you probably need a fucking reinstall of your os, too.

thirty seconds to launch outlook. jesus. what is it, 1998?