Buy from listings with many sales and good reviews.

Look for reviews with real images and real seeming phrases in many languages, not 10 accounts all posting the same phrase with no pictures.

Buy from stores with a name, preferably who have established a "brand" for themselves across many products. UGreen are a great example of this for USB gadgets.

Don't buy from stores named Shop195772040, these will take your money and disappear or ship fakes. Don't buy suspiciously cheap items with no sales, these will do the same.

Experiences can vary from seller to seller, but I've owned a few oddball motherboards from china that shouldn't exist. (old server cpu sockets shoved onto a Micro ATX Board) Any time I've had issues getting a refund took maybe a week or two at most. Although the last issue I had was a few VRM components exploding and throwing shrapnel all over inside the case. So buy at your own risk on some things.

MIPS ist dead, so not much gain in keeping compatibility with it anymore.

> I don't think LoongArch is the same thing with MIPS according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson

Where did I make that claim? I never said that.

I think it depends on your skillset and goals. If you want to run other peoples' software and compilers and whatnot, it doesn't hurt to implement to an existing spec. If you're going to write your own or need a lot of mods, may as well roll your own architecture.

A 4-years cycle is also nowhere near enough for any long term project. This is the cost of democracy where you have to give people short term wins in order to win an election.

Infrastructure projects can take decades. The country’s budget is a 0 sum game. Developing something expensive will lead to cuts or shortages somewhere else and those people suffering will make you pay in the next election because they won’t care about the greater good from 20 years from now.

Your opponents will exploit any perceived failure and use it against you. And they will equally take your victories and sell them as their own if your long term project happens to bear fruit on their term. So everyone focuses on what looks good inside a term of a few years to sell in the next election.

And a general election process that lasts from January to November of every fourth year, and an executive hobbled until the January after that because, goodness knows why, you get to remain in power for weeks after someone else has taken the mandate to govern.

> You talk about "western" politicians, but this point feels like it only really applies to the US with its ridiculous two-year cycle.

I'm German, it's even worse here because we have 16 states plus the EU elections and that means you have about three to five distinct elections in any given year. And with the exception of the small states no one gives a fuck about (sorry Saarland), each and every single of the state elections is seen as a sign for federal politics.

High interest rates in general are a strong deterrent from investing with that kind of time horizon. The risk free rate of return has skyrocketed, and investors no longer have to turn to risky gambles to make a return. The same thing happened in Canada when housing was propped up by the government in ‘08, leading to real estate sucking all of the money out of the economy. The US is in this position now because of how allergic all politicians have become to using taxes for the purpose of cooling down the economy. The only feasible campaigns are full inflationary spending, all the time, and the only difference is who the money goes to. The stupid electorate who vote for candy for dinner instead of eating vegetables are equally to blame.

Are C930 CPUs actually available?

For the Loongson 3A6000, there is an independent performance review: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/loongson-3a6000-a-star-among-ch...

I couldn't find something comparable for C930 CPUs.