Empirically, Europe's embrace of the "energy revolution" has done far more to bring it closer to Russia, making energy 2-3x more expensive and gradually destroying Germany's industrial base. So much so that it can't even produce as many munitions as Russia, in spite of a GDP around ten times larger.
No, the energy revolution in question is renewables, specifically solar plus batteries. In no sense has any European embrace of renewables (to the extent that it exists (or does not exist)) in any given country pushed them further towards Russia, the run-down gas station of the world. It is pushing them closer toward China, which is almost certainly as bad for Europe in the long run as relying on Russia or the US, but it's not like Europe was competitive in the non-renewable energy sector either, outside of Norway.
Considering that for electricity production gas is imported, but this amount is stable over decades in Germany and a small fraction of overall gas use, and not imported from Russia anymore, I would say this is nonsense. Did the US stop importing from Rosatom btw?
Aside from the memory cost being exorbitant, 4th/5th gen ES CPUs aren’t horribly expensive for the core count you get. 8480s and 8592s have been quite accessible.
Stuffed an 8480+ ES with 192gb of memory across 8 channels and it’s actually not too bad.
Why were old PCs beige? It turns out, Germany had workplace standards laws that mandated light, unobtrusive colors on office equipment. Because it was expensive to offer different SKUs for different regions, gray or beige PC cases became the only ones available worldwide.
If a jurisdiction as big or important as California passes a law mandating certain features on products available there, manufacturers may make those features part of their products worldwide to save on costs. OEMs may make bootloader-locked PCs which cannot run operating systems that don't do age check in order to comply with the law in California and Brazil, and decide it's not worth it to offer a bootloader-unlocked version.
If you think PC manufacturers are required to make bootloader-unlockable PCs, the only thing requiring them to do so is an edict from Microsoft, something they can and will reverse in order to comply with the law.
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