They don't. If they aren't holding USD or something pegged to it then it is not devalued.

Note that I'm strictly discussing this topic using words in the way you'd find them defined in a reputable dictionary or a high school economics book.

Lots of countries have a lot of debt, many are in similar boats or worse as USA when you look at various metrics like debt per capita, per gdp, etc. Politicians and their "experts" and economists etc generally insist this is perfectly fine. I also get the feeling they're probably lying about that and many other things, though I don't know enough about the subject to actually know myself.

But whatever difference it makes is still just a matter of degrees. Countries keep reserves of and trade in currencies other than USD. Some get more benefit than others from this, and they all work to benefit from what advantage they can take from their own positions within their means to do so.

US can do some things more, bigger, longer, etc., for various reasons. Just like Australia can do more, bigger, longer, etc., than Tonga. I don't really see anything profound being said here.

USA might be in some advantageous position now, and it might not always be in such a position, which is a pretty bland observation, but it also does not support the idea that they are living beyond their means today.

US dollars might one day cease to be the global reserve currency in which case Americans will not see such benefits associated with that. This is a true statement. That doesn't mean they are currently living beyond their means either though.

Okay so we have this scenario you constructed where the Chinese company produced great value without engaging in any IP theft or unbalanced terms of trade or currency manipulation and the American company simply took that and gouged prices with anticompetitive practices. What exactly is your question? The hypothetical American company in your example did not create value, by definition. I don't see how that's particularly useful though.

Uh, yes.

> And that's heavily skewed on how an item's value is calculated.

An item's value is calculated according to what it is bought and sold for. That's how value is determined. What would you rather it "skew" towards?

> When you use $50 of parts (all made in China) to assemble a machine that you sold at $500 , $50 of GDP value is attributed to China while $450 of GDP value is attributed to the US. But who did more "manufacturing"?

If an American company can design and develop and sell a product that requires $50 of parts and people are willing to pay $500 for it, then clearly that company created an enormous amount of value, didn't it? By definition almost. Manufacturing output or value is not a function of the number of beads of sweat or drops of blood or hours in a factory to make something. It is how much value (i.e., what others are willing to pay for) the things you create.

What does this mean really? That is their means.

For a somewhat topical example, people of Australia get access to cheap medications (in part because they pay to subsidize the cost of them but also because) their government negotiates with pharmaceutical corporations to pay lower prices. This kind of negotiation would be completely out of reach of any private Australian person, but they are not living outside their means. Their means includes the means to elect governments to run the country for the benefit of its own people including doing things like securing lower prices for medications.

> China for example, sends huge number of electronics and all kind of other consumer goods that Chinese produce by sweating in 12 hours shifts in 6 day work weeks in exchange for imaginary numbers.

Until 1990, Kenya had a higher GDP per capia than China. It is absolutely not "imaginary". Work produces real value, just because you can represent or trade that for allegedly "imaginary" currency does not mean that the value created was imaginary.

> US is definitely not the victim here. There's the risk of this system stop working and that's when the US might have hard times due to being forced to live by its means and have no ability to kickstart its own production when that time comes.

US manufacturing output is double that of China's on a per-capita basis.

> It makes sense to be worried for such an eventuality but US is definitely not being taken advantage here.

Seems like that's the popular assertion but I don't see much solid reasoning behind it in this thread (not picking on you specifically), just handwaving about how USD's status as a global currency somehow makes trade deficits inevitable despite simple facts available that US had a surplus trade balance 50 years ago, when the USD has been considered the global / reserve currency for over 60 years.

I store my code in a completely distributed fashion, often in several places on different local devices (laptop, build server, backup, etc) not to mention on remote systems. I use github and gitlab for backup and distribution purposes, as well as alternative ways people can share code with me (other than sending patch emails), and other people use git to get and collaborate on my work.

distributed version control system doesn't mean distributed storage magically happens. You still need to store your code on storage you trust at some level. The distributed in DVCS means that collaboration and change management is distributed. All version control operations can be performed on your own copy of a tree with no other involvement. Person A can collaborate with person B, then person B can collaborate with person C without person A being in the loop, etc.

It's just semantics, but the point is that the article wasn't saying the same thing OP was worried about. There's nothing wrong with testing B, B', B'', etc. until you find a significant performance improvement. You just wouldn't test B several times and take the last set of data when it looks good. Almost goes without saying really.

I don't think that is what it is saying. It is saying you would write one particular optimization (your hypothesis), and then you would run the experiment (measuring speed-up) multiple times until you see a good number.

It's fine to keep trying more optimizations and use the ones that have a genuine speedup.

Of course the real world is a lot more nuanced -- often times measuring the performance speed up involves hypothesis as well ("Does this change to the allocator improve network packet transmission performance?"), you might find that it does not, but you might run the same change on disk IO tests to see if it helps that case. That is presumably okay too if you're careful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

smap is an OS security measure, and so does not get disabled by mitigations=off. smap can be pretty draining for certain IO performance though. IMO it should be more well-known or covered by a more obvious option.

Linux kernel developers are really bad at defining and naming options like this.

They were pushed by cultish types with little evidence. There was this assertion that all these things were wonderful and would reduce effort and therefore they must be good and we all must use them. We got object oriented everything including object oriented CPUs, object oriented relational databases, object oriented "xtUML". If you weren't object oriented you were a pile of garbage in those days.

For all that, I don't know if there was ever any good evidence at all that any of it worked. It was like the entire industry all fell for snakeoil salesmen and are collectively too embarrassed about it to have much introspection or talk about it. Not that it was the last time the industry has fallen for snakeoil...