Kent State, 1970.
He’s got the medal, but that’s meaningless. The Nobel Committee took the extraordinary step of announcing last week the prize itself is not transferrable. In Trump’s mind, I’m sure, he actually believes he was more deserving of the prize, but if wishes were horses…
I think (for example) the Minnesota situation is at far greater scale than Kent State and not something any Guards would be coming into “cold”. Particularly if it’s the Minnesota guard going in. But the comparison is still apt, and chilling, because at Kent State they were protesting, not burning and pillaging. But the governor at the time claimed the guard was needed to “restore law and order” or words to that effect. The right has always confused protest or even just discouraging words with violence, because for them simple disagreement = personal annihilation.
Four members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe were snatched by ICE on January 8th. One has been released. The other three cannot be found.
Europe selling off all of its U.S. Treasury securities would not implode the U.S. economy. Europe, as a whole, holds about $1.5 trillion in Treasury securities, and dumping them all at once would cause some short term volatility in the market, and a temporary rise in bond yields, but not much after that. Daily bond trading in Treasuries often exceeds $700 billion, so a $1.5 trillion swing would only be about twice common daily trading volumes. It would also adversely affect the Euro more than it would the dollar.
Various European leaders have floated the idea of seizing U.S. bases on their territory, but that’s easier said than done. Unfortunately, the EU could do very little, either militarily or financially, to counter a concerted U.S. attempt to seize Greenland, It would, however, burn all of the bridges with our allies that took decades to establish, and probably give Russia and China the incentive to escalate the war in Ukraine and invade Taiwan.
Yet more proof that ICE is basing arrests on skin color rather than attempting to determine the actual status of the people they kidnap.
I’ve heard more pessimistic analyses, particularly if such a vast sea change in the world order produced a stampede to get out of bonds that might spread beyond Europe.
It isn’t helping that Trump has openly mused that some bond transactions are “fraudulent” and so we don’t have to pay out on them. That doesn’t contribute to the notion that US Bonds are some sort of gold standard safe investment.
There’s been a general slow-walking away from US Bonds already.
However I’d be delighted if there were not enough of a pull-back to, by itself, nuke the economy. And to be fair, I’m given to understand there are other market forces that may make bonds more attractive. As usual, it’s a chaotic / complex situation.
“Prepare for the worst, hope for the best” is kind of where I’m at, this close to retirement. I’m not in a position to wait years for investments to recover. And the markets continuing to rise despite all of Trump’s actions strikes me as a bubble overdue to burst. So I’m pretty much in savings accounts or equivalents at this point. Plus a little bit in a gold ETF.
I have heard another theory, which is that the tech bros that control the majority of the market valuation at this time really could care less about anything Trump is doing so long as the business environment is favorable to them. That may be why the removal of regulatory oversight and the prospect of lower interest rates and a continued near-zero tax environment appeals to them and the wreckage us commoners might experience is of no concern, particularly with their laser focus that’s all-in on their imagined dystopia of AGI and getting rid of most pesky employees.
It’s late stage “catabolic capitalism” no matter how you look at it … exactly HOW it will not end well I’m not at all certain, but it will NOT end well.
Imagined is correct. AGI is decades away, at least, and it may never be viable.
In terms of any meaningful definition of AGI (IMO, a human-equivalent sentience), yes. But it depends on your definition. Increasingly they keep moving the goalposts. Of late there’s a lot of chatter that anything that can do a task as well or better / faster than a human is AGI, at least in tat particular domain. It is not. But there may be some point to it being “good enough” to be transformative overall. I’m still deeply skeptical though. I still don’t see a use case for my coding environment that’s free of technical debt, for example. I could probably deploy agents to do some of the business name / address standardization / detection of DBAs, but I suspect it would be less accurate (and easily more expensive) than the $25/hr person who does that for me now.
For me the fundamental problem with proper curation of a DB system is that the loop has remained static for decades now despite the details of the tech changing: build a system to spec, a change is requested or unexpected input arises, it breaks 47 things, you re-engineer it. All honchoing a bunch of agents does is add a level of indirection to the problem so far as I can see.
Three people are under federal investigation in the shooting of Renee Goode: her wife, the Mayor of Minneapolis, and the Governor of Minnesota.
Notice how none of them is the shooter or the shooter’s bosses?
He’s a nick fuentes fan…
Funny how that works …
What happens when you fire 4,000 skilled employees and “replace” them with an “AI”
So the man-baby in chief threatens European countries with additional tariffs for…supporting Denmark when they tell Trump rather politely that Greenland is not for sale, and for sending a handful of officers to Greenland (not thousands of combat ready troops, not hundreds, just a handful of staff officers — France sent 15 persons, Germany 13, Sweden two or three, Norway two, and the UK just one). That European countries naturally stick together and support their neighbours instead of caving in and sucking up to Trump when being blackmailed is so unacceptable to him that he would rather have a trade war with Europe, alienating the EU countries, and destroy Nato with his behaviour than hear any protests. It is so bleeding obvious that this is not about security (the US could just use the agreement the US already had with Denmark regarding military bases on Greenland), but rather Trump’s personal greed and his total inability to back down and admit he’s made a mistake. This whole shitshow is so much worse than one could have ever imagined. I’m not able to locate the source again, but just a few months after Trump 2 was a fact, the worst-case scenarios imagined by political planners in an undisclosed country were put to shame — Trump 2 shat all over the place with bigger and stinkier turds than they were able to imagine. Now Trump is shitting again, this time on the dinner tables of the long-time allies of the USA. European countries have IMHO shown an unprecedented patience with him, hoping that the system would come to its senses, but I fear that there is just so much they can and will tolerate. I’m genuinely worried.
I would suggest, since respect and credibility have now waved goodbye to Maria Machado, that her $1.15 Million Nobel award remain in the Nordic region and sent to the people of Greenland to purchase body bags.
Orange’s instability and belligerence increase daily with very little meaningful resistance. At this point I will be quite unsurprised if he doesn’t eventually use his 60 day window to commit forces to Greenland without Congressional approval.
Either that or he may invade another easy to defeat Latin American nation to attempt to terrify Greenland into capitulation.
I wonder if Putin is paying trump to divert nato’s attention to Greenland and away from their neighbor Ukraine.
Fun Fact: Trump is not the first person to be gifted a Nobel Prize by the actual recipient. In 1920 author Knut Hamsun received the prize for literature. In 1943 he gifted it to Joseph Goebbels.
You can’t make this shit up.
And that’s the core issue behind all of his actions and perceptions. This will not change as he is incapable of grasping any other reality.
Everyone lugs out Hitler, but Trump has proven himself too much of a game show host to deserve such a comparison.
The more I watch Trump the more he reminds me of Nicolae Ceausescu. Both share the tendencies of authoritarianism, cult of personality and a serious lack of understanding on economic issues. In 1966, Ceaușescu banned abortion and contraception. His habit of accumulating debt to fuel his fever dreams led to food shortages, as well as shortages of heat and electricity being inflicted on the population of Romania.
In 1989 Romanians had suffered enough of his bullshit. Anyone recall the 1989 Romanian Revolution?
The sign roughly translates to Down with the Tyrant in English
CLIFF NOTES: In December of 1989 the Romanian people had reached their limit with Ceausescu and his wife Elena and rose up in defiance of his regime. Ceausescu was not a complete idiot and made a run for the border. He was able to escape Bucharest, but never made it out of the country before being captured by local soldiers while substituting a helicopter for a car. This was December 22, 1989.
As you may have guessed, a tribunal was hastily formed…the Exceptional Military Tribunal, to be precise. Ceaușescu was charged with genocide, subversion of state power, destruction of public property, destroying the economy, and attempting to make his hasty exit from Romania using $1 billion in foreign accounts (which were never located, seized…or even found…)
The Trial lasted approximately 60-90 minutes and ended at 2:50PM. To no surprise, both were found guilty. Within minutes of sentencing, both Ceaușescu and his wife were dragged into a court yard and executed by firing squad. They needed a lottery to chose the firing squad as they had more willing volunteers than the eight required. This was Christmas Day, 1989.
Communism ended in Romania on that day and has never returned.
Cautionary tale?
Ni dieu ni maître!
I believe it’s referred to as karma…
Overconfidence, herd mentality, fear of missing out and access to cheap capital is the crack cocaine of speculation. It’s not the power or failings of the technology, it’s the inherent failings of capitalism and non-regulation that put us in the cross hairs of a financial crisis again.
It may crash and burn…but the suffering will not be at the top. It never is. America seems built on the Public Cost-Private Benefit model. Examples? Transcontinental Railroads, the Homestead strike, the United Fruit Company (which became Chiquita), 110 years of oil company subsidies, the 2008 financial bailouts…just to rattle off a few examples of externalized responsibility and accountability for the private sector.
The Greek word is akrasia.
