Putting aside the lack of evidence that tariffs meaningfully reduced the US trade deficit as other posts here remarked, reduction of the deficit would be catastrophic for the USD based global financial system anyway so it's bad for the US and bad for the world.
Dollars can only be created in the US by the Federal Reserve or US banks. Since the USD is the currency in which most global trade is conducted, the US MUST provide USD liquidity to the rest of the world that they can exchange between one another and the US (cf. Triffin Dilemma). If the rest of the world has no dollars, e.g. an Indonesian company cannot sell goods to an Ecuadorian company settled in USD.
The benefits of this system to the US are enormous (cf. Exorbitant Privilege) since US can print dollars out of thin air and 'give away' these bytes in a database and receive real goods in exchange. Real goods that people spent energy and expended labor for, in exchange for bytes in a DB.
If the US stopped supplying dollars to the rest of the world, it'd first spark a massive financial crisis as companies that owe USD to one another default in a chain reaction. Afterwards, an alternate to the USD would emerge as 'hard money that everyone accepts'. Candidates for this currently are limited in the space of fiat, Europe and China are net exporters so they cannot supply EUR/CNY to the rest of the world in net just like a US with trade surpluses cannot. Possibly there could be a return to precious metal backed currencies. But in any case, in such an environment, US could no longer receive goods 'for free' in exchange for bytes in a database and its life standards would greatly suffer.
Reminder that EU institutions were designed from ground up to smother democracy:
- Members of EU Parliament cannot propose regulation, only the unelected Commission can, MEPs can only vote yes/no
- EU Parliament is the only parliament in the world where an absolute 50%+1 is needed to reject a bill, ignoring how many MEPs are present/voting. In every other parliament, a quorum requirement plus a majority vote is needed to pass a bill.
WoW has a lot of mechanics involving line of sight (eg a spell you begin casting when the target was in LOS will fail when the casting time finishes if the target moves out of LOS) and positioning (AOE spells, spell ranges, NPCs/objects you can interact with only within a certain range, among many others)
Syria had an extremely destructive civil war and one of the worst collapses in living standards ever of any country (measured by however you want to look at it - HDI, GDP/capita...)
Meanwhile Egypt was overtaken by Vietnam and performed similarly to peers like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Algeria, Philippines.
Egypt's and Sisi's performance is decidedly average.
If you look at UNDP historical HDI data [1] you will see that Egypt barely caught up with the HDI levels of poorest Eastern European countries like Moldova from 10 years ago and is still well behind the HDI levels of better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990.
Point is that income from dividends, rent and capital gains far outstrips the $150k the 90th percentile guy makes [1], which you have conveniently ignored. The $150k 90th percentile earner has more common with the $50k 50th percentile earner than he does with the billionaire earning $100M of capital gains, dividends and rent from assets. The 90th percentile guy is a wage laborer like the 50th percentile guy; they are effectively the same class. The only different class is the capital owning class.
Being able to afford a slightly nicer car or house does not change your class. Being able to influence elections, buy lobbying power, play power games, being in the "in" group of capitalism changes your class.
"Top 10%" is such a misleading slice here. The guy who's at the 9.99th percentile is a normal salaried worker not doing better. The gains are entirely concentrated in the tiny billionaire slice buried inside that 10%. In fact wage growth for the top decile has been recently slower than bottom deciles [1]. Incomes still grow fast in the top decile, but mostly due to assets. And those assets are disproportionately in the hands of the billionaire slice of that top decile.
They had a large memory manufacturer, Infineon, who spun out their memory division as Qimonda which then went bankrupt [1]. They were the 2nd largest in the world at one time apparently. Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.
Japan has an even sadder story. They were the DRAM top dog for a very long time. South Korea entirely ate their lunch.
His research is in Game Theory. He should have realized that, in a situation where all competitors are (possibly) using LLMs, the game theoretic optimal choice is to use LLMs.
It's worse than OpenAI or Anthropic. However their lower tier consumer offerings can sometimes be had for <$10/mo on offer and come bundled with other Google services like cloud storage.
Enterprise plans don't have the equivalent of the subsidized-usage-included Claude Max/ChatGPT Pro plans anymore. The revenue generated and total amount of tokens used by individuals is probably a tiny fraction of tokens billed at API pricing.
A related viewpoint is that overparametrization is good because the model is stranded when the Hessian has all positive/zero eigenvalues. If we treat the probability that a particular Hessian eigenvalue turns positive as a Bernoulli process, the chance of all eigenvalues going positive/zero exponentially decreases as the parameter count increases
> If you're building out a brand new system, why not make use of the computing device with input/output capabilities
There is no sovereign EU mobile OS. Adding a hard dependency to Android/iOS is removing one US hard dependency in your payment stack to add another. So, physical cards are a must until there is a European mobile OS with widespread adoption (i.e. never).
Unfortunately, the EU approach here has been not only adding this iOS/Android hard dependency, but also locking it down with crap like device attestation to make sure that it is impossible to use their "sovereign" systems without a US corporation (Google/Apple) certified device. They are actively hostile to alternatives like Lineage or Graphene for instance.
Dollars can only be created in the US by the Federal Reserve or US banks. Since the USD is the currency in which most global trade is conducted, the US MUST provide USD liquidity to the rest of the world that they can exchange between one another and the US (cf. Triffin Dilemma). If the rest of the world has no dollars, e.g. an Indonesian company cannot sell goods to an Ecuadorian company settled in USD.
The benefits of this system to the US are enormous (cf. Exorbitant Privilege) since US can print dollars out of thin air and 'give away' these bytes in a database and receive real goods in exchange. Real goods that people spent energy and expended labor for, in exchange for bytes in a DB.
If the US stopped supplying dollars to the rest of the world, it'd first spark a massive financial crisis as companies that owe USD to one another default in a chain reaction. Afterwards, an alternate to the USD would emerge as 'hard money that everyone accepts'. Candidates for this currently are limited in the space of fiat, Europe and China are net exporters so they cannot supply EUR/CNY to the rest of the world in net just like a US with trade surpluses cannot. Possibly there could be a return to precious metal backed currencies. But in any case, in such an environment, US could no longer receive goods 'for free' in exchange for bytes in a database and its life standards would greatly suffer.