Peter wrote:
I don’t know anything about PC component supply issues. I have built many PCs and I always build them using the best technology of a year ago
Unfortunately, tech from a year ago is still in short supply and being scalped. For example, in graphics cards for PCs, the RTX 3070 came out a year ago and is still only available from scalpers at 2 to 3x RRP. It’s only now that the RTX 3080 Ti is actually available at manufacturer’s RRP, but the 3080 Ti is a very high end graphics card (starts at around £1000) and only the highest end 3080Ti cards are not selling out instantly (i.e. the £1400+ ones).
I think you are talking about “gaming” PCs, and parts for these will be in a short supply because so many people are sitting at home 
I’ve not used these gaming video cards for years; they are so noisy you can’t work in the same room. I now build with only fanless video cards, but then one can’t run fancy games.
I think the bubble will burst in the next few months because I am seeing the various cowboy stockists offering stock, and that’s like a CB just before all the water falls out of it The next stage will be official distributors offering almost-reasonable delivery dates but only if you place a big order. The stage after that is a collapse and total capitulation.
Airborne_Again wrote:
I also disagree. Many companies (in Sweden at least) have found that productivity actually increases with homeworking.
This has become permanent many places. Not full time at home, but half the time or some similar. It also requires less office space. The traffic is reduced. Less time used in traffic. It is simply much more efficient for everybody, at least if the work can be done in front of a PC.
Graham wrote:
while you hold such fundamentalist views
Where does fundamentalism start in your opinion?
Graham wrote:
f you are not prepared to live in a world where the government does not mandate medical procedures and exert close control of individual behaviour to ensure everyone conforms to your own risk management strategy,
But my government does! the control they exert of my individual behavior is so close, that I am not allowed to hit you in your face and take the plane you fly for my own pleasure. I actually like living under a government that takes care that I am not taking away all of your belongings just because I’m stronger than you. And I have also the fundamentalist view, that my government should prevent other people that are stronger than me to do the same with my belongings.
The same way I don’t think it is fundamentalist at all that the government actually enforces everybody to do a small and low risk action like getting the vaccination for the much larger benefit and risk reduction for everybody.
Graham wrote:
To wish to reverse that remedy and exclude those who have made different personal choices to you, thus enshrining in regulation that your own choice is the only acceptable one, is totalitarian.
Does the very same wording in your totally non fundamentalist view also apply to other actions of my personal choice like driving drunk, speeding through the inner city, shooting my guns in populated areas?
Would you also say that I should be allowed to do this freely and everybody who wants to forbid that is a totalitarian because he tries to impose his personal choice of not speeding drunk through the city center on all others?
Do you really suggest that everybody should confine himself to his own house/property just because they have a different risk assessment of me shooting around with my guns in the city?
If the answer to that is no – isn’t it in reality your totalitarian belief, that shooting around in public is wrong while not getting the vaccine is right?
Peter wrote:
I’ve not used these gaming video cards for years; they are so noisy you can’t work in the same room
Well, that’s not at all true. I’m sitting right next to one now (albeit an older one, a GTX 980 because I refuse to buy things off scalpers) and it’s quieter than a mouse fart. My high end PC at my home office is actually quieter than most typical office PCs because the fans it does have are large diameter and low RPM (and will slow right down when there’s little demand on them, such as when I’m in my IDE writing Java).
Perhaps high end graphics cards were once that noisy, but anything remotely modern (e.g. at the oldest, a GTX 980!) is near silent, even when you’re thrashing it.
Malibuflyer wrote:
If the answer to that is no – isn’t it in reality your totalitarian belief, that shooting around in public is wrong while not getting the vaccine is right?
Yet, Germany is the only country in the world? (I think) with no speed limit on the motor way How many dies in traffic each year vs how many dies due to covid?
I think you are mixing stuff that are completely unmixable here. The government’s role in a pandemic is to protect it’s citizens and supply protective medicine (vaccine). It is not to force restrictions on the individual’s right to chose how to live.
Besides, Denmark has opened up fully today. I just wish the Norwegian government would do the same (not that it would matter all that much, nobody cares anymore in any case). It’s more that the Danish government shows a gesture if common sense.
@Malibuflyer as I said, the discussion is impossible given you cannot see the fundamental differences between legal requirements to, on the one hand:
Not punch people in the face
Not steal aeroplanes
Not drive drunk through cities
Not spray gunfire in populated areas
and on the other hand:
Have a substance injected into your body against your will in order to be allowed to live a normal life.
My government does not (and neither does yours, yet, I believe) exert close control over individual behaviour. What it does is set a framework of laws, generally prohibiting things that are, usually by common consensus, considered highly undesirable. In a properly functioning democracy this is fluid because if enough people disagree with a prohibition or restriction, the government will change the law or else lose an election to one that will. You will never in a million years find a majority of people to support repealing the laws that prohibit the four objectionable things you mentioned, but mandatory vaccination sits somewhere else on the spectrum – splitting opinion with (thankfully) a good majority against.
Thankfully I don’t have to have medical procedures to remain within the law, nor do I have to produce documentation on demand (but perhaps you do), nor do I have to refrain from any perfectly reasonable activities that I may wish to pursue. This latter point was not always the case in the past, for instance in times when religious leaders and moralisers had an influence on the law, and unfortunately may not always be the case in the future. I am somewhat concerned about the future in this regard, but less so for the UK than other European countries where there is (a) a greater recent historical tendency towards totalitarianism, and (b) an extra level of supra-national government attempting to exert control over people.
Graham wrote:
you cannot see the fundamental differences
Sure – but obviously beyond claiming that there is a fundamental difference you can not explain what it is? In all cases certain behavior of myself is enforced or prohibited.
Graham wrote:
What it does is set a framework of laws, generally prohibiting things that are, usually by common consensus, considered highly undesirable.
Absolutely! And risking the lives of others is quite an undesirable “thing” in most societies.
Graham wrote:
but mandatory vaccination sits somewhere else on the spectrum – splitting opinion with (thankfully) a good majority against.
So – thankfully – you start to realize yourself that we are talking about a spectrum and not one thing that is “totalitarian” or “fundamentalist” to ask for.
And with the other part of you are simply purporting wrong facts (aka: Fake News!) at least when you refer to to Germany:
According to polls in Germany, there is by no means “a good majority” against mandatory vaccination but to the opposite a faint majority of 54% for it. Only 35% are against and 11% undecided. It is in exact opposite to what you claim the government that does not implement the will of the majority due to constitutional concerns – at least in case of Covid.
It is also not true, that there is no such thing as mandatory vaccinations: Currently in Germany measles vaccination is actually mandatory if you wish to visit a school or kindergarten.
TBC vaccination used to be mandatory in almost all European countries at some point in time (if I remember correctly, UK has been the only exception) and still is in many Eastern European ones. Do you really think that in the 50-80 all European countries have been totalitarian regimes run by fundamentalists?
Malibuflyer wrote:
TBC vaccination used to be mandatory in almost all European countries at some point in time (if I remember correctly, UK has been the only exception)
As far as I can find out, TBC vaccination has never been mandatory in Sweden. OTOH, Smallpox vaccination of children was mandatory from 1816 to 1976. (But given that many hundreds of thousands of people died of smallpox in Sweden during this time period, you could ask how mandatory the vaccination really was in practise.)
Well from 50s-80s everything to the east was totalitarian, as was Spain under a military dictatorship. And nearly all European countries have totalitarianism within living memory.
I have not purported to speak for Germany in terms of support for mandatory vaccination.
I tend to the view that governments would enforce it if they felt the population would accept it. They increase control and regulation wherever they think they can get away with it.
