Impeachment is the equivalent of an indictment, and the subsequent trial and removal is, probably correctly, very difficult to attain. That leaves a vast area of things a president shouldn't be able to do because it's illegal, but there isn't proportionate recourse.
The next Congress and the next president have a job to do there.
The turmoil comes not only from the fact of tariffs but from the manner in which the US operates tariff policy if you can call it that. It's the equivalent of button mashing your game controller. There is a low upper bound to the effectiveness, and this approach isn't just applied to tariffs. Firing scientists, blocking aid to children at random, musing aloud about invading NATO allies all adds up to wanton destruction of US soft power and reputation. The specific policies hardly matter in a shit storm of incompetence.
I distinctly remember Apple having produced a video showing off an automated assembly line for PCB production for the original Mac. It's not like they didn't try it.
I have to wonder who aspires to become Japanese or Chinese, or even the superficially plausible goal of me becoming German. It just wouldn't enter my mind.
As for social integration, the Chinese people I met seemed astonished and pleased that I could make any headway with the language or the food.
Though it was years ago now, I did spend a couple of years frequently traveling to China for fairly long stays. I learned enough Mandarin to get by on my own. The "scariest" thing is realizing you might have to walk for an hour in a random direction to come across a landmark like a known metro station or a hotel where you can get a taxi and have the concierge translate your desired destination.
I was mostly in first tier cities, though I did travel through some more obscure places. The worst hostility I experienced was 5 foot tall grandma with sharp elbows determined to cut in line in front of the big stupid foreigner who is passive aggressively placing his wheelie bag in her way.
If you're curious, just go. The cities are amazing, the people are friendly. Even in Beijing you can easily avoid the tourist traps. While it's not as perfectly safe as Japan or Taiwan, I spent a lot of jet lag recovery time wandering the streets late at night. Once I spent half an hour in a taxi garage at 2am at some unknown location after a 45 minute misdirected taxi ride, arranging a ride to my intended hotel. I think that's about as lost as one can get and it was fine.
Everyone's looking at Israel speed running reputation destruction, which, TBF, is the bigger deal than what the tech industry is doing to itself, but we're not exactly covering ourselves in glory with techno fascism, social media rage farming, and the data center over build. JD Vance is blind to the extent that people hate the techno fascists. It's easy to miss because there's plenty of other things to dislike.
I saw this on Facebook before I saw it here. While it bears a superficial resemblance to 1000s of clickbaity tech stunts this one really delighted me. Some of these should be edited into a remastered release of Blade Runner.
Africa is mostly on 4G networks, and while 3G isn't a majority of the connections, it's still the next biggest share of infrastructure, far ahead of 5G which is relatively scarce.
This is in the context of a population that really depends on mobile wireless for market information if they are farmers, and for payments. Having a mobile phone can take priority over having a flush toilet.
Starlink has both opportunities and challenges: 5G is faster and cheaper and more reliable. But mobile wireless revenue is low, so capex is low too. Combine this with a big rural population, and Starlink has a great opportunity, if they can find customers who can afford it.
You're thinking of trains and rail lines. They deployed an obnoxious billionaire to dig tunnels that are useless and to propagandize against mass transit, while building the world's envy of a rail system.
On the other hand, the Chinese lag way behind in data centers. Odd.
Let's assume you're not lumping all data centers in together in bad faith. Just like Elon's tunnels are not a subway system, a repurposed crypto mine isn't a real AI data center. There's a right way to build, fund, and power data centers, and a sketchy, unethical, greedy, polluting, inflationary, and financially corrupt way to do it.
If it were true that data centers are building "American dynamism" and China wants to suppress that, surely they would be building data centers the way they build trains.
The public seems to be aware that it's a hype driven grift, much more so than when it was a flood of DTC dot-coms, or plowing fiber to nowhere. There's so much money sloshing around that people correctly believe the potential for corruption of their supposedly representatives is rife.
People know Kevin O'Leary isn't a real businessman, and the crypto bros pivoting to AI data centers are scammers. The incentives, especially property tax concessions, all look like corporate welfare. Who in the right mind would support Larry Ellison getting a tax break?
Persecuting or favoring investors on a political basis "and to repress academic work they find politically objectionable" has come to America. The only business people intellectually weak enough to not be a threat are real estate developers.
Not that the tech industry leaders who are way too comfortable with fascism are making such a good showing either.
Meh. If anything Elon is even worse than Zuck at making random big bets at the wrong scale, based on the desire to have a platform. Xai. Cyberetruck. And just so you don't think I have perfect hindsight, I'll predict that Starship is the wrong rocket.
Falcon is the model Y of rockets: competent, something that should've been evolved. But was too boring for Elon to pay attention. He could've had two product generations of moat, but he wanted to show that he's a strategic genius.
This plus subsidizing R&D via military contracts is how jet engines for passenger aircraft remain a US and European pursuit.
Will jet engines never be made in China? Don't bet against them. There's no guarantee that the legacy of the Cold War technology race will continue to subsidize western jet engine development.
There are reasons to think this subsidized moat will hold for a while: geared turbofan engines will deliver another increment in efficiency that passenger airlines can't ignore. Until that technology step is commoditized, the incumbent jet engine makers are relatively safe.
Everyone with a certain level of resources wants their own platform, if they don't already have one. The problem is they all underestimate the resource commitment it takes to possibly win at that game, despite having a lot of money to spend on it. And even if they do commit at Meta[verse] levels, they can end up with nothing to show for it, just like Meta.
I've been working on Android system programming and apps since before Android had a phone to run on. Even in those relatively early days when Amazon built a phone based on AOSP, I could tell that they didn't commit enough in areas like maps and navigation to challenge even a nascent Google-Android ecosystem.
Android is 10X more complex now, and will become even more so with on-device agents and related API's like AppFunctions. Apple has their own corresponding tech stack. Fighting against the OS native agents on those devices is going to be a fool's errand.
This is exhibiting a lot of software guy detached from reality. The reality is the teen girls kill themselves for being "too fat" because bullying engagement makes money for big commercial social media sites. Somebody else on this thread claimed to be somewhere addicted to Mastodon sites.
In principle they're comparable. In the real world, no high school kids are going to harm themselves over an argument about Mint versus Ubuntu on a 100,000 subscriber ATmosphere site. It's like comparing the Dominican cigar shop selling hand rolled cigars with Philip Morris. Unedifying.
That's a lot of would've could've should've, nevertheless we can test that idea that nuclear power would be more advanced: it wasn't over regulated in the Soviet Union, and that got us the RBMK 1000, a design with inherent flaws that make the remaining reactors in operation a high risk. Nuclear power isn't over regulated in China and their reactor designs are adapted from existing mainstream reactor designs.
I'm not sarcastic. I practice Effective Ambiguity.
I make tiktoks about project management and tech: https://www.tiktok.com/@zigurdmednieks
I wrote a 5G guide that helps people who are not deeply familiar with mobile networks cut through 5G industry hype: 5ggui.de
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