CountSessine

But Apple going bust would be a genuine loss for the world. So I’m glad they’re being conservative.

(Not that I would be happy with either anthropic or OpenAI going bust - I hope they can weather whatever is ahead).

Strategically, Australia is more sympathetic to the US, but your trade with China is many multiples of your trade with the US. If you join the US you’ll have to raise tariffs against China and if you don’t you’ll naturally fall into China's orbit. Interesting times!

Like I said, he takes the advice of the last person who talks to him. He’s very suggestible. The best parts of his presidency, so far, have been when he follows the plan in project 2025, which you may not agree with, but is at least sane and coherent. The worst bits are when he adlibs, like the stupid tariff escalation with China.

Ultimately the biggest problem with Miran’s plan is that now that Trump is tearing up these trade agreements, no one has any reason to believe that the new one is worth the paper it’s printed on. He has no integrity and no one signs agreements with people who have no integrity.

Every industrialized exporting country in the world has optimized for exporting to the US, and there’s plenty of govt policy involved. Trade barriers are the norm, not the exception. If other countries optimize their trade rules, regulations, and money supply to optimize for a sizeable trade surplus with the US, they can change their policy to reduce the surplus.

But the amounts are actually kind of clever and it reflects the fact that there's a more mature understand of trade barriers now vs when the WTO was negotiated.

How much do you know about trade barriers? Beyond tariffs, they're extraordinarily complicated and rely on regulations, trip-wires, and unequal application of rules.

Canada has "free trade" with dairy, but only on dairy imports up to a point, and after that heavy tariffs apply. But no one ever imports enough to incur those tariffs, so, that's free-trade, right? But actually, no one considers the Canadian dairy market worth the trouble without being able to import large amounts of dairy. So Canada can legitimately say that the trip-wire isn't applied, but it's a long ways from "free trade" because large importers are kept out.

China requires that foreign companies must partner with local companies to sell into the Chinese market. This effectively leads to a lot of technology transfers. It's not a tariff, but it's pretty clearly a "trade barrier" because companies that want to protect their IP are denied access.

In the 80's when US trade reps were negotiating with Japanese trade reps, the Americans would try to convince the Japanese that free trade was best for Japanese consumers. The Japanese reps would just respond, "how much do you want us to buy?"

The Japanese really didn't believe in free trade, and they were actively manipulating the value of the Yen at that point (it would be a few years still before the Plaza Accord), so they knew that just lowering tariffs wasn't going to make US goods sufficiently more competitive in Japan.

What's changed in 35 years is that the US doesn't really believe in "free trade" anymore either - not after all of the grief the WTO brought. The simple formulas are a no-bullshit approach to trade - the same ones that motivated those Japanese trade reps.

"I don't care how your trade barriers work - currency manipulation, tariffs, excess regulation, unequal rules - just fix your sh*t to reduce the trade imbalance."

OTOH, if you believe that China is basically Germany circa 1938 (and indeed, China in 2025 is the largest and most successful fascist state in all of history), then kneecapping China's economy makes plenty of strategic sense.

But we could always just keep buying Hitler's Volkswagens - that's the direction our incentive gradient points in. The US doesn't need to be the global police - we could always just let China have Taiwan, the Senkakus, the Ryukyus, etc...

The current "plan" seems to be to leave behind the largely-defunct WTO once and for all and build a selective free-trade alliance specifically excluding China, much like GATT was. I don't think this would really make the US "richer" (or any participant in the alliance) - in fact it would probably make us all a bit poorer. But it would make China much poorer which at this point is kind of the goal.

https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...

But that's just today. Next week someone else might get Trump's ear before he speaks to the press.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma

It didn’t really seem to me at the time like this was an appropriate VCS for a team of developers using CI.

That said, I don’t know how valuable getting rid of FP on ARM is - I once benchmarked ffmpeg on 32-bit x86 before and after enabling FP and PIC (basically removing 2 GPRs) and the difference was huge (>10%) but that’s an extreme example.

If you support this idiocy, let me assure you that eventually it will be used against you when the Wrong sort of people are in power.

Brilliant! Why didn’t we think of that?!? MOARE TCAMS!!!

It really looks now like it’s demographics. This is just the sort of amazing thing that countries with a young well-educated workforce and a below-50 managerial class can accomplish. Now we’re all in the age of the gerontocracy, with Japan Inc. leading the way. Even the United States, ostensibly the most societally agile nation in the world, can’t seem to find political leaders who aren’t in comas or don’t suffer micro-seizures in public.

There is only one external event - an event that takes place outside of China - that can seriously disrupt the CCP's rule over China and that is Taiwan successfully declaring independence and international recognition.

It would be a humiliating loss of face for the CCP and would probably be followed by a desperate reshuffling within the party and perhaps even a civil war. The CCP is strong and rigid, but like ceramic, not like steel. Their only mandate rests on China's continued economic and diplomatic success. Taiwanese independence would be the nucleating particle for an explosion of domestic unrest and chaos.