alvvayson

You don't understand. This is tech tribal war.

"Big Tech" is Apple, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta. Companies which were fully allied with the Democrats, and which were king of the tech hill until now.

Musk, Thiel and Ellison (Tesla, Palantir and Oracle) are allied with Trump. Lets call them "Tech B".

Vance is doing code speak for: Tech B is gonna break Big Tech up and take top spot.

And Big Tech knows this, which is why they are scrambling to get into Trumps good graces and trying to get Trump on their side.

They have more money and influence right now and they are trying to leverage that to keep top spot.

And Trump is just letting the two teams bid up each other for his favour.

Correct, but the Rabbit Hole goes deeper.

The company will only reduce margin if they expect to lose volume and if they expect that they can regain sufficient volume by reducing margin to make up for the loss in margin.

And the reduction in volume will only happen if there are alternatives for consumers, including the alternative to not buy.

When consumers need the tariffed good regardless of price, the company will not reduce margin.

(Yeah, it's complex math).

Long story short, someone else said it better, a tariff works well, with little impact on consumers, when there is a comparable non-tariffed alternative.

At the other end of that spectrum, i.e. an essential good with no non-tariffed alternative, the tariff cost is fully borne by consumers.

Finally, in the case of TSMC, their main product right now are the most advanced AI chips for which there is no US alternative. And US Big Tech needs volume that the US cannot produce.

Trump is basically taxing big tech.

I don't disagree, but I have never understood why Putin attacked in 2022 and not in 2016-2020. The original war in Ukraine started in 2014.

My best guess is, he thought he could rig an election or corrupt Zelensky and only invaded when that didn't work. And maybe he was confident Trump would win a second term.

He might have also been doubting the possibility of Trump winning in 2024 and he saw Ukraine getting stronger and integrating with the West day by day.

Thing is, his real goal is to fuck up that alliance.

Trump has been compromised by the Russians ever since they bailed him out in the 90s. He is actively dismantling American global power, just in a way that is wrapped in a US flag so that the voters don't realize it.

Upvotes for correctness. But don't forget the centrists.

The people you describe are a minority. And they convinced the centrists that DEI is just rich people keeping out working class people from top jobs.

These same centrists who did vote for Obama, did support abortion rights and marriage equality, just not as strongly as the left.

It all boils down to taking back the narrative and OP is trying to do that.

It only takes that much time and cost in the West, because we killed nuclear with regulations.

Look how many reactors China is building.

I refuse to take anyone seriously that spouts this level of ignorance on technological matters.

And due to climate change, they are sadly burning like crazy.

The laws of thermodynamics say no such thing. Plants use solar energy to extract carbon from the atmosphere daily.

We could farm fast growing crops and bury them to sequester the carbon, but using nuclear energy is going to be cheaper and require less land.

E = mc2

People really don't understand the massive amount of low carbon energy we have at our disposal with nuclear fission.

An unwillingness to use it just means we don't want to solve climate change and would rather have our little "oh noes, world is ending" panic.

China seems to be the only big economy that understands the reality and they will probably solve climate change for the rest of the planet by 2050.

I fully agree and in typical American fashion, affirmative action and DEI were just bandaids to quickly solve some of the effects of institutional discrimination, instead of solving it at the root.

Even I, as a very progressive person, don't like some DEI hires. But the actual problematic DEI hires are not talented people like Kamala Harris. They are connected incompetent people.

I think Clarence Thomas would be a good example. By most accounts he is the most corrupt and incompetent justice, who just happened to run in the right conservative circles.

In the business world, I also see quite a lot of well-connected incompetent people. It used to be white gulf buddies, now it tends to be the white sister-of, or the latina wife-of, the gulf buddy.

Maybe the Trump kids are the best example of DEI hires. Ivanka Trump, anyone?

"All" is stretching it, but I think TikTok and the fediverse have definitely attracted significant portions of the progressive left.

What remains on reddit is mostly the liberal left and a few progressives in niche subs.

But if you go to a sub such as r/worldnews, it's clear that there are no actual progressives commenting on that sub. They either got banned or they left.

Extra funds are only useful if they can provide a competitive advantage.

Otherwise those investments will not have a positive ROI.

The case until now was built on the premise that US tech was years ahead and that AI had a strong moat due to high computer requirements for AI.

We now know that that isn't true.

If high compute enables a significant improvement in AI, then that old case could become true again. But the prospects of such a reality happening and staying just got a big hit.

I think we are in for a dot-com type bubble burst, but it will take a few weeks to see if that's gonna happen or not.