Fooyin is also a solid choice.

It’s a bit short-sighted to say that Trump is the one calling in shots here, specifically to weaken the US. It is pretty clear that he is following the plan put forward by the Heritage Foundation word by word. If I understood correctly, the idea is to make the American economy more resilient at the expense of all of its (poor) citizens. Once that is done, they can then leverage their safe zone to further influence policies in other countries. For example, get the EU to lower regulations, so American companies can extract more wealth.

Here is a quote from the actual “Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership” PDF:

Needed reforms

[…]

Increase allied conventional defense burden-sharing. U.S. allies must take far greater responsibility for their conventional defense. U.S. allies must play their part not only in dealing with China, but also in dealing with threats from Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

1. Make burden-sharing a central part of U.S. defense strategy with the United States not just helping allies to step up, but strongly encouraging them to do so.
2. Support greater spending and collaboration by Taiwan and allies in the Asia–Pacific like Japan and Australia to create a collective defense model.
3. Transform NATO so that U.S. allies are capable of fielding the great majority of the conventional forces required to deter Russia while relying on the United States primarily for our nuclear deterrent, and select other capabilities while reducing the U.S. force posture in Europe.
4. Sustain support for Israel even as America empowers Gulf partners to take responsibility for their own coastal, air, and missile defenses both individually and working collectively.
5. Enable South Korea to take the lead in its conventional defense against North Korea.

[…]

They are engineering most of these situations that we’ve seen in the media specifically to make the ideas more digestible to the average population. See the Zelenskyy case: “This is going to be great television” - the guy is not even hiding it.

On one hand, Taiwan is right to say that the US won’t abandon them. The US does not produce enough chips locally to just let them get gobbled up by China. However, this sort of “theatrics” is not over, and they will come up with a reason to scare Taiwan into investing a lot more in defence, specifically to prepare them for a fight to destabilize China.

It’s truly sad that this administration is now in power to push these ideas. The average American is going to become much poorer and hateful due to all protections previously put in place being dismantled. Hopefully people wake up and kick them out of office, but the damage done to foreign relationships is already done.

Precisely. The only enemy that the US conservative party sees is China. Everyone else is a business partner that they must strong arm into favourable deals for the US.

I don’t know… I feel like this is all premeditated. Project 2025 basically describes this exact thing: get EU to stop relying on the US. It’s all a bit more insidious than just Old Donnie being stupid and vain. I truly wonder whether this is a US conservative’s gamble to get stronger allies, or just a much bigger plan to extract more wealth for the rich in the US.

I, for one, would love to see Europe get rid of American dependence, but I have a feeling that everything will go back to the usual after getting peace in Ukraine. The US has enough buffer between them, China and Russia to not care, and plan for much farther ahead. They will keep lining up the pockets of policy makers to get them to lean towards their interests, and 2-3 generations down the line we nudge even closer to far right capitalism. Especially since Europe now might start shifting it’s industry to produce weapons, which will take our focus away from other important areas, like local chip manufacturing.

I’m curious to hear other opinions though. What is your take on all of this?

Wait until they learn that OpenAI does the exact same thing. Try to get advice on how to crack software and see how far you get.

Might be even cheaper if you wait a bit and build it yourself. Next gen GPUs are coming out, which will lead to some price cuts on the current gen.

However, like others here have mentioned, you’re paying extra for them building it for you and warranty.

I don’t know if ro.pcpartpicker.com works well for Romania, but you can also give that a try and see what the individual components would net you on the local market.

Building the computer yourself along with your kid could also be a nice opportunity to teach him (and maybe yourself, if you’re not that knowledgeable) about the underlying components.

It’s amazing that Linux gaming is becoming a thing that’s better sometimes than Windows gaming (minus the getting banned part in some games). I also like that AMD is making some big pushes on open source drivers, plus their ROCm open-source alternative to CUDA.

This is a great time for Linux users! :)