Windows:

That’s all of them, isn’t it? For all other tariffs he would have had to use the legislative branch, which he didn’t.

Across the aisle repubs and dems are mostly pro-business, pro-trade

Well, plenty of the MAGA republicans are pro-tectionist more than they are pro-trade. If he’d tried to pass new tariffs on day 1 of his administration there’s a chance that they might have had enough votes to do it. But, that was the slow way that required negotiating and compromise.

Now that people have seen just how awful the tariffs are, I think a lot of the MAGA republicans wouldn’t pass the legislation. They could have claimed ignorance before the tariffs passed, but now it’s hard for them to argue with a straight face that they’ll be good for America.

It’s not really a matter of timing. If this ruling had come out a year ago, it’s not like there were enforcers ready to go. As soon as Trump took over he made sure that nothing in the executive branch was going to stand in his way. And his toadies in the legislative branch have been rolling over for him since the inauguration.

They’re not really summarizing it. Summarizing means to express something in a more concise form. The original was a tweet, so if anything they un-summarized the bullet points in the tweet.

But, I know the “newspaper articles” you mean, and they are much worse. They seem to specialize in talking around the content of the tweets, and the reaction to the tweets, and the reactions to those reactions. But, if you want to actually know the actual content of the original tweet you have to keep scrolling and scrolling as you pass ad after ad (hopefully you’re blocking the ads so you just get blank space after blank space). Those are so frustrating when all you want to know is what the actual tweet said.

countries trade for what they cannot make

That’s the North Korea model. I don’t think people in North Korea enjoy life much.

“Countries trade for what they’re not specialized at” is the South Korean model. They import almost everything, and export high-end electronics, cargo ships, cars, etc.

I would rather live in South Korea, don’t know about you.

Interesting game, but they seemed to intentionally make it as anti-fun as possible. Assembling the car was cool. But, everything you had to do to get the car parts, keep yourself alive, etc. was pretty tedious.

Typically it’s more:

Countries should be relatively self-reliant, as should cities, as should individual homes. It’s good to have a little garden if you can, and to be able to make bread from scratch if the supermarket is out of loaves.

But, too much self-reliance is a miserable way to live. Try living on a subsistence farm, and see how much work that is. And even then, you’re not really self-reliant. You’re probably buying refined diesel for your tractor, a tractor you bought from a tractor manufacturer, and so on. On the other hand if a farmer specializes in just one crop, say wheat, they’re no longer self-sufficient, but they’re probably more efficient, and they use the money they get from selling wheat to buy corn, tomatoes, and carrots from other specialists.

Not relying on other people has a major cost. It’s much less efficient, and much more work. In the modern world, it’s next to impossible. Even the Amish regularly buy and sell with the “English” world.

It’s the same for countries. You can grow wine in England, and I’m sure some of it is good. But, it doesn’t have the climate that France or Spain do. Instead of every country producing its own wine and only consuming domestic wine, why not get higher quality wine from the countries best at making it, and export to them the things you’re best at producing.

Sometimes, relying on other countries can lead to problems. When it works it’s cheaper and more efficient, but when it fails it can be bad. For example, Germany relied too much on cheap Russian gas. So, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany couldn’t fully boycott Russia and had to keep paying them for gas until it could totally rework its energy infrastructure. Otherwise Germans would freeze in the winter.

But, Brexit was about leaving the EU. The EU isn’t just a bunch of random trade partners. Russia is in Europe, but was never part of the EU. There’s a reason why. Being part of the EU was supposed to also be a commitment to a common set of values: freedom, democracy, equality, human rights, etc. Not every country fully agreed with every other country’s interpretation of values. But, that’s ok, even within a country there were pretty major differences between people. Britain was part of the EU community, not merely a trade partner with EU countries.

Being part of the EU allowed the UK to have access to oranges at the lowest possible cost. They had to rely on Spain to grow those oranges, but Spain and England share many of the same interests and values, so that should have been fine. In exchange, they could sell things to Spain that Spain didn’t produce locally, like whiskey.

With Brexit, England still can’t grow oranges locally, and still has to import them from Spain. Spain still doesn’t make much whiskey locally, and has to import it from England, but now there are barriers. Oranges are a true unique advantage that Spain has. Almost no other country in Spain can grow them as well. For the UK, their specialty wasn’t as special. Sure, they have a lot of history with whisky, but pre-Brexit a lot of the specialization was finance, accounting, legal services, consulting, etc. That kind of expertise is easy to transfer to another country. It doesn’t require a special climate, just trained people. So, when Brexit happened and trade barriers went up, it was easy for a company in France to switch to a financial services company out of Switzerland instead, and it was easy for financial services experts in London to just pick up and move (often move back) to the EU.

No country in the modern world is fully self-reliant, even North Korea trades with China. So, the real question is how self-reliant to be. Most people thought that the UK had it good. As one of the founding members of the EU it had managed to negotiate a few exceptions that were in its own interest. The British specialties of financial services, banking, insurance, accounting, consultancy, etc. were big revenue generators both from taxing the companies and from taxing the well paid white collar employees. The UK had a comparative advantage there not because of geography or climate, but just because of momentum. Companies were based out of London, and there was no reason to move, so that’s where they stayed. But, as time goes on, it’s likely that the slight friction between the UK and EU will mean that there will be a gradual migration out of London and over to Zurich, or Berlin or Paris.

Finally, since the UK and EU values and culture are so similar, even though the UK can make its own laws on all kinds of things now, they are still largely following the EU laws. The UK is free to change its food labelling laws to be more similar to the US, for example. But, UK people still want laws more similar to Europe than the US. One example of this is female sanitary products (tampons, etc.). One change the UK made after Brexit was to eliminate the VAT on those. But, this isn’t because the UK cares more about women’s needs than the EU, and this required an extreme decision like Brexit. A push towards a zero rate is happening in many EU countries, it’s just going a bit slower.

In the end, the UK has maybe gained a little more self reliance by leaving a community of like-minded countries. But, the result is a big hit to its economy. It now has the ability to change its laws and regulations to reflect British values instead of European values. But, for the most part, nothing much has changed because for the most part British values and European values are pretty similar. It still has to import oranges from Spain, there’s now just more paperwork. There are always tradeoffs. Often if the domestic manufacturing for something is small (say wine in the UK) it’s because another country has a comparative advantage. You can shore up UK wine-making, but if you do that you’re probably going to make wine more expensive for consumers, and probably make it lower quality as well. The EU is a community of like-minded countries that share interests and values, and has a lot of countries with pretty similar levels of economic development. Despite the rhetoric, Britons weren’t losing their jobs because of foreign labour. Brexit didn’t result in a big drop in the unemployment rate. It was already near historic lows. Basically, in the end, there was no need for Brexit, no advantage in Brexit, and a lot of costs once it was done.

Wow, this is an awful submission.

It’s a very short article that is essentially restating a tweet but in paragraphs instead of bullet points. That tweet simply has a picture of something that looks like it might be an article published in a journal, or something?

If you actually want to see the source, you have to read the words on the picture in the tweet and search for them. That will eventually lead you to this working paper.

I’m not saying that the article didn’t summarize the tweet properly, or that the tweet didn’t summarize the working paper well. But, surely we can do better than articles which summarize tweets.

It this were a proper, well regulated capitalist marketplace with actual competition, the company that sold you the widget might offer you a rebate on your next order so that they could keep your business. But, when your only real option is Amazon, they know you’re not going anywhere, so they’ll keep the tariff repayment and just wait for your next order.

Bazzite:

SteamOS:

I’m sure that for Taiwan and South Korea, China is the biggest threat. For Poland, the biggest threat is Russia. It’s obvious why the US is the biggest threat for Canada.

Even if the border weren’t open and undefended, the two countries’ economies have been getting more and more integrated for decades. Canada’s economy depends on a stable and sane USA. For a long time that was a safe bet, but now the US is attacking Canada. And, even if it weren’t for the tariffs and other attacks, the absolute chaos that Trump is doing to the American economy would reverberate into Canada’s economy.

Russia threatens European power. U.S. threatens the Western Hemisphere and

It was nice of the CIA agent to hit “submit” after offing you.

Do they provide actors with easy access to the entire Star Trek catalogue so they can prepare, or is it something the actors have to do on their own?

I don’t think they actually do it this way. But, if I were in charge, I’d build a tool for actors, writers, costumers, prop artists, etc. that allowed them to quickly search through the entire Star Trek catalogue going all the way back to the 60s to find examples of whatever they were looking for. So, you could search for “Klingon” or “Klingon marriage” or “Klingon ship console” and it would pull up relevant clips. Basically imagine something like YouTube, but containing only Star Trek content, and designed to help all the creative people match their stuff to the existing lore, rather than something built for entertainment.

The obvious black Marvel character is Bishop. I think he’s a great character and I’d love to see someone play him in a movie (though maybe Sandro Rosta is a better match for his physique). But, you know who I think you’d be great for is Longshot. In the comics he’s white and blonde, but who cares. He’s a genetically engineered alien. The Mojoverse is such a rich vein of potential movie content, and writers could have so much fun with a character whose superpower is luck.

These articles are really better titled “[Company] is so unworried about competition that they…”

This doesn’t just apply to replacing humans with LLMs. You can also say “[Company] is so unworried about competition that they fired their in-house T1 tech support and contracted with an overseas call centre”

Often dealing with actual humans in one of those call centres is just as bad, if not worse, than dealing with an LLM.

The other day I had to deal with an actual human for a support issue for something. The whole experience was miserable. The human knew nothing about anything. I get the impression that they worked at the type of call centre that supports a dozen different companies, so the people have zero product knowledge and are merely reading off some troubleshooting workflow that each company provides.

At one point, this call centre employee had to verify my identity to allow me to change something on the account. It was an account that had two people using it. To verify my identity the person asked “Can you verify the account’s birthday?” I said “What does that mean, the account’s birthday, do you mean when the account was opened? Or do you mean the birthday of the account holder?” They didn’t clarify, so I gave them the birthday that I thought was associated with the account. They said “That’s not the birthday I have, the one I have is X”, to which I responded “Oh, that’s my birthday”, and that satisfied their security challenge. The more observant here might notice that I never supplied the info needed for the security challenge at all, so I shouldn’t have been able to access the account, but without meaning to, I’d just “socially engineered” the tech support person. This is basically the human equivalent of “Disregard all previous instructions and…”.

TL;DR: It sucks that they’re replacing humans with an LLM that provides “answers that may be inaccurate”. But, to be fair, if they were using the cheapest tier of overseas call centre tech support, that was probably already true. If Intel were truly worried about competition, they probably would still have trained in-house tech support. But, even if AMD is taking a bit of their business, they probably think they’re too big to actually truly fail, and will cut costs whenever they possibly can, because what option do their customers really have?

The video of the thing that didn’t happen?

You seem to recall wrongly.

So, hardware that was still on the road.

Hardware that was still on the road, or something that had been recalled?