Well put. We're in agreement on all of this, and understanding why Trump is so obsessed with tariffs helps to explain why he is so thoroughly confused about what exactly his tariffs are supposed to achieve. They are, simultaneously, a means of raising government income, a means of repatriating manufacturing, and a means of forcing other countries into more favourable trade terms (any careful examination shows that each of these objectives instantly nullifies the other two; it literally cannot be the case that more than one of these is true). The reason he's so confused is because he starts with the use of tariffs as his desired outcome and then post-hoc justifies it with whatever reason he's been given most recently. He wants to force other people to the table, yes, but he also wants to bring manufacturing back, and he also wants to cut taxes and replace them with tariffs, because really he just wants tariffs to be a thing that he does, that succeeds by some definition. The actual definition of success is irrelevant.
Voroxpete
A person raising their voice is doing more than a person who chooses to stay silent. Why would you direct your anger at the former rather than the latter?
This idea that anyone "not doing enough" needs to shut up and sit down is exactly the kind of toxic bullshit that fascists want you to consume. They want you to feel that everything has to either be some huge world changing gesture, or it's just not worth it. Life isn't like that. Real resistance isn't about blowing up the Death Star, it's about thousands, millions of tiny acts of defiance that build upon each other. Every time someone says "this is wrong" someone else is inspired to agree. Every time someone shows up to a protest, someone else is inspired to show up the next time. You don't change regimes in a day, and you don't build movements out of nothing. They accumulate, millions of tiny choices gathering together into a vast whole.
Resistance starts in the mind. Fascists want you to think the way you're thinking, because if you can't even get to the point of giving a shit about what they're doing, you'll never ever get to the point of actually doing something about it.
Refusing to comply really can be as simple as just choosing to call out their evil, every single time. It's a starting point. It's easy and trite to say that big trees grow from small acorns, but much harder to really understand what that means, to take into your heart the idea that every single word or act of defiance matters, that enough drops really do make an ocean.
I'm not asking you to plan a revolution. I'm just asking you to give a shit. Because the people telling you to stop giving a shit are the ones who want to do terrible things to your country, and they need your passivity in order to succeed.
Did. Can't seem to find it in my link pile anymore. Take from that what you will. I'll update if I can find it.
TD Cowen (which is basically the US arm of one of the largest Canadian investment banks) did an extensive report on the state of AI investment. What they found was that despite all their big claims about the future of AI, Microsoft were quietly allowing letters of intent for billions of dollars worth of new compute capacity to expire. Basically, scrapping future plans for expansion, but in a way that's not showy and doesn't require any kind of big announcement. The equivalent of promising to be at the party and then just not showing up. Not long after this reporting came out, it got confirmed by Microsoft, and not long after it came out that Amazon was doing the same thing.
Ed Zitron has a really good write up on it; https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/
Amazon isn't the big surprise, they've always been the most cautious of the big players on the whole AI thing. Microsoft on the other hand are very much trying to play things both ways. They know AI is fucked, which is why they're scaling back, but they've also invested a lot of money into their OpenAI partnership so now they have to justify that expenditure which means convincing investors that consumers absolutely love their AI products and are desparate for more.
As always, follow the money. Stuff like the three mile island thing is mostly just applying for permits and so on at this point. Relatively small investments. As soon as it comes to big money hitting the table, they're pulling back. That's how you know how they really feel.
Technically, it's a reference to Make Some Noise :P
Trump is dead serious about the tariffs. He's been dead serious about tariffs for pretty much his entire adult life. This obsession goes back decades. Yes, people are opportunisticly using the chaos to profit, but the chaos is not the plan, just a side effect of Trump's total inability to plan.
This has been building for a while. We've seen Trump slowly start to criticise Putin more and more. And the reason is simple; Putin is making him look bad.
Ending the war in Ukraine was a key promise of Trump's campaign. He cast the Dems as ignorant bloodthirsty warmongers who only knew how to shovel money into the death machine, while he was the savvy deal maker who would end the war in a day.
One of Trump's biggest problems is that he buys his own hype. I think he really did believe that Ukraine was only an ongoing issue because no one had really tried to sit down and hash out a deal with Russia. And of course, with his cozy relationship with Putin, he was just the guy to do it.
But there is no deal to be made. The things Ukraine wants and the things Russia wants are fundamentally incompatible. There's no middle ground between "I want to exist" and "I want for you not to exist." And Putin's claims of wanting to come to the table have only ever been a smoke screen.
So now Trump looks like a fucking moron because the "easy" deal he claimed he'd get isn't happening, and Putin keeps on thumbing his nose at the US by flagrantly violating every agreement he makes.
For Putin, pissing off Trump doesn't matter. He's already got what he needs out of him. Trump was only ever a Russian asset in the sense that they knew that getting him into power would accelerate the USA's decline. They're not calling up and sending him orders every day. They don't need to. As another commenter here brilliantly put it, "Trump is a fire-and-forget idiot."
But there's at least some hope that this break with Putin might see him turn to supporting Ukraine purely out of spite. He's done pettier things for less reason.
Using self-hosting services enables me to accomplish tasks more quickly.
As opposed to what? Using a cloud SaaS alternative, or not having that service at all?
People who influence my behavior think that I should use cloud services.
This question is going to get bad data. No one likes to think of themselves as being influenced. A more effective phrasing would be "...people I trust..."
If you divide the data into red states and blue states, you'll see that police killings have fallen in blue states, but risen in red states.
Still one of the greatest burns I have ever seen in my life.