He’s not bright, and he’s been extremely insulated from consequences.

To be fair, not keeping his side of the deal is basically Trump’s signature move.

This further reinforces something I’ve been arguing for a while now; Trump doesn’t like the idea of war.

He’s a big fan of military power. He loves flexing, loves brandishing his YUGE military. And he loves quick, decisive military action. The bombing raids in Nigeria and Iran, the kidnapping of Maduro. But he doesn’t like war, and he’s very, very hesitant to push for any kind of protracted military action. He wants quick, easy results. He wants instant gratification. War is long and complicated and messy, and when people die everyone gets upset at you. Trump doesn’t have the patience or the willpower for long term projects and war is very much a long term project.

None of this is to suggest that he’s some kind of pacifist or rationalist. He’s happy to destabilize global peace, he’s happy to kill people in droves. He might as well be a warmonger when judged by the effect he’s had on the world stage. He’s just really, really bad at it.

The EU’s position here seems entirely reasonable; they made certain concessions to the US in return for certain concessions in kind.

While the tariff rate they’re facing now is the same as what they agreed to, it’s also now the tariff rate that the US is applying globally. That means the EU is no longer receiving any special consideration, so why should they give any?

I would assume their legal theory is “Just fucking try to stop us”

He absolutely does not have the numbers to get this through congress. Across the aisle repubs and dems are mostly pro-business, pro-trade, and these tariffs don’t make an ounce of sense to any of them. Some GOP goons would vote for it just to make Trump happy, but way too many would rather protect their wealthy donors than protect the President. There’s not a lot of political future in making the Waltons unhappy.

Oh, is it that time of the month already?

For anyone who doesn’t know, this stuff happens all the time. It’s extremely routine, to the point where it doesn’t even get press coverage most of the time.

It’s not, like, good that Russia routinely tests NORAD response times. But it’s also not an indication of any sudden escalation. They’re just sampling data, like they always do.

The Germans have barely built any weapons for close to 80 years AFAIK.

You are joking, right?

Sure. It’s just probably not the primary cause in this case.

About half of all EU politics is “What are France and Germany arguing about this time?” They’re the old married couple of Europe.

Not everything is the US. Germany and France are more than capable of having beef on their own. There a few, uh, notable examples that come to mind.

You’re forgetting that the President of Norway personally refused to allow the Nobel committee to give him a peace prize, so now he’s incapable of thinking peaceful thoughts.

Again, we’re still in that “reading every over sentence” mode. For example, I say “hyper-advanced automation” and you reply claiming that “Good enough” automation is perfectly achievable. Yes. I know. I never said it wasn’t. I never said anything about good enough automation at all. And that kind of thing goes on throughout your response here.

By all means continue your conversation with whoever you think is making all these arguments, but they bare little resemblance to anything I’m saying, so there’s really no point in my responding any further.

It’s very clear that at this point, insofar as there is any logic at all to the decision making of people investing in Tesla (and there’s very little evidence of that), they’re evaluating it as a software company, not a car company.

I mean, I could point you to a few economics journalists who would argue otherwise. Ed Zitron’s been screaming about the downfall of AI for the last two years straight.

I feel like you’re only reading every other sentence of what I say. In this instance, you seem to have fixated on this part, but sailed right past the part where I said that there’s zero evidence that anyone can actually produce hyper-advanced automation. I never argued that it was a rational decision to go all in on this possibility, and that’s entirely clear from my previous comments.

Ed Zitron is completely correct, but he’s also making exactly the same argument I am; that these people cannot actually achieve the technological revolution they are promising. That doesn’t change the fact that, if their wish granting genie was real, it would basically have unlimited upside. The problem is not how they’re pricing the outcome, the problem is how they’re evaluating the probability of achieving the outcome.

unless you’re just hand-waving and predicting 10-20x growth over the next decade.

That’s exactly what they’re doing.

The problem is that hyper-advanced automation is essentially unpriceable. When your potential market penetration is “replace all human labour” your profit potential is infinite.

The real is issue is not how they’re pricing the potential upside, its that none of these companies have remotely demonstrated that they have the ability to actually produce that upside. It’s an entire industry shilling a fantasy on the back of some very impressive sales demos.

It’s very clear that at this point, insofar as there is any logic at all to the decision making of people investing in Tesla (and there’s very little evidence of that), they’re evaluating it as a software company, not a car company.

This seems to be largely based on the notion that Tesla is the world leader in self-driving, and poised to become the world leader in other areas of automation. And that would, admittedly, mostly justify their very high share price, if there was literally any evidence it was true. Of course, what they actually have is a self-driving system that is only number one in fatalities caused, and a bunch of faked demos of robots made using low paid remote operators.

Tesla is easily the single best demonstration of how fucked our economic system really is. That a company can so blatantly lie, over and over, about what their products can actually do, and somehow continue to see their share price increase tells you everything you need to know about how utterly fictitious the entire notion of the stock market is.

They wouldn’t be talking openly about cancelling elections, but they’d certainly be discussing it internally. And you’ll notice that the rest of the administration isn’t talking openly about it. Trump is, because he’s a raging ball of id who’s too stupid to keep his mouth shut. Important distinction there.

And remember, we’re talking about optics, which means whether or not they actually pulled ICE out of Minnesota is irrelevant. What matters is that they felt the need to say they’re pulling out. Why would they, if they didn’t care about what people think?

Don’t ever get drawn into the trap of thinking that authoritarians don’t need to care about public opinion. All governments ultimately exist by the consent of the governed. Democracy just turns that process into a formalized and largely bloodless one. There is no amount of tyranny that can keep a government in power if a sufficiently large portion of the populace doesn’t want them in power.

And Trump’s regime has not even achieved tyranny yet. They’re working on it, very hard and at a terrifying pace. But they can only get there if people let them.

They absolutely care about optics. That’s why they’re talking about cancelling the midterms in the first place. That’s why they’re pulling ICE out of Minnesota. That’s why they’re trying to cover up the Epstein files.

They wouldn’t lie so much if the truth wasn’t dangerous. Never forget that.

“This thing cannot be understood.”

Actually it can if you just pay attention to X, Y and Z.

“Ahah, you fool! I knew that all along. I just pretended I didn’t understand because that makes me look smart!”

OK? Whatever floats your boat, bud. You have fun with that.

Sure, but that just puts the administration in a double bind.

If they appeal to the idea that actually its still a war even without a formal declaration, that means that there have been dozens of elections held during “Wartime.”

If they try to go the other way, that means they need to actually get a formal declaration of war, which hands the power back to Congress. In no way shape or form does Trump want to do that. And even if he did, they’d still have to explain how this constitutes a greater crisis than WW2, which didn’t get in the way of holding elections.