A reasonable compensation for the trade barriers in the US. If anything, it's too low.

Why do Peterbilt trucks still exist? Don't US truckers deserve to drive Scanias and Volvos?

Volvo and Mercedes (freight liner) trucks are popular in the US. Truckers tell me Peterbuilt makes a good truck and compete well, but since I don't drive a truck I can't tell you what makes them better. I can tell you that Volvo and Mercedes are considered basic trucks for companies to own, while those who own their own truck like pay extra for luxury features in a Peterbuilt. (the only luxury I can see though is chrome decorations, again not being a trucker I have no clue if anything else is better or not)

One of the tricks was that exceptions/traps/interrupts were handled in a neat way.

The microcode looked at the first instruction of the handler. If it was an old instruction, a backwards compatible stack frame was created. If it was a new instruction, a new-style stack frame was created.

Data General published a couple of papers about their new 32-bit architecture.

Europe had really high literacy long before it reached the living standard of most of current Africa. Living standards do not have to be high for near universal literacy.

> , but that modern environmental variables raise that risk to such a high likelihood that it's become something it never used to be.

Well, yeah, because more people get old enough to get it.

It has a speed of more than 2.

It was achievable long before that. The only hard part in the 80's was getting access to the datasheets, usually in the form of photocopies of photocopies.

x86 machines are cheap and ubiquitous. It is astoundingly easy to google for help/tips or ask random people on the net.

There are also really good virtual machines and emulators available.

Most of the weirdness came in in the 286 and can be more or less ignored. The parts that can't be ignored happen mostly during initialization.

If you want to baby step your way towards assembler and hw programming, DOSBox + an IDE/debugger setup from the late 80's/early 90's is really not a bad combo. That could be Turbo/Borland Pascal or C(++) with Turbo Debugger and Turbo Assembler, for example. You get a running environment, you have direct access to the hardware (DOS won't stop you), you can access it from Pascal/C, you can use inline assembler in both, and you can use external assembly files if you want. You can even successfully single-step and use breakpoints a lot of the time.

A Raspberry Pi or similar is a good alternative. I don't think any non-ARM platform is.

> French want less criminals and immigrants in the street. Whatever it takes.

If that were true, France would have a vastly different immigration policy. It would even have an explicit, drastic, and targeted emigration policy.

Since when the general population are the decision makers? /s

Well, half /s anyways. Working class don't want them because "they're taking our jobs". Middle class don't want them because "blah blah security". Upper class want them because that's cheap labour. And as it happens, the upper class is the class in power.

Most french don't care. But this still creates tensions, even between immigrants, say for like housing. As we say in french, it's a "bourbier".

In the end, it's the same situation as in any other country where immigration has taken over the frontline of the political debate.

How so? Romania has gypsies, Germany has Muslims.

Things are a lot easier if you are basically controlling a river delta (of a river with an absolutely huge hinterland).

Same for the Dutch, btw.