Trump / Musk (other than DOGE)

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“…
President Harry Trumantold the assembled delegates that “the responsibility of the great states is to serve, and not to dominate, the peoples of the world.”

Today, these lofty principles look quaint, if not outright irrelevant, as the world returns to what was presumed to be the natural law of statecraft since the dawn of history: The strong do as they please and the weak suffer as they must. Russia, one of five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, is three years into a war of conquest in Ukraine, annexing parts of the country and seeking to eliminate the independence of the remainder.

Russian leaders openly talk about their designs on other neighboring states, including members of the European Union and NATO.

China, another permanent member of the Security Council, supports the Russian war machine and is preparing for a war to take over Taiwan, while bullying the Philippines and other countries with its claims on the South China Sea.

And in the U.S., President-elect Donald Trump has begun to indulge in imperialist rhetoric of his own, repeatedly threatening to absorb Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal zone.

… Today the concept of a rules-based international order looks more and more utopian—and the survival of the United Nations increasingly uncertain. “It’s a real question to ask, 80 years after the end of World War II, whether that structure can be saved, what it would take, and whether it would be replaced,” Norway’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said in an interview. …”
 
Continued

“… Many strategists and diplomats see the world returning to something like the Concert of Nations that emerged in Europe after the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th century. Under that system, praised by the late Henry Kissinger for preventing global war for nearly a century, empires recognized each other’s spheres of influence worldwide, including the right to oppress and dominate less powerful countries and peoples within those spheres.

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was the American version of this idea, proclaiming U.S. hegemony over the Americas and a refusal to get involved in European wars. This month Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national-security adviser, described the president-elect’s vision as “Monroe 2.0.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s frequent pronouncements about a multipolar world reflect a similar nostalgia for 19th-century imperial power. The idea of multipolarity appeals to many people in the developing world eager to shake off American domination, but in practice it would take even more power away from the weaker nations, said German diplomat Volker Perthes, a former U.N. Undersecretary-General.

… There is widespread agreement around the world that the U.N. system is increasingly out-of-date. The U.K. and France, both Allied powers in World War II, were made permanent members of the U.N. Security Council in 1945 and so have veto power over its decisions. Much larger countries do not, including India, Germany, Brazil and Japan. Attempts at reform have been thwarted since the 1960s.

“The United Nations system was formed when most of the countries of the world were not sovereign entities, and whether we like it or not, it cannot reflect a true representation of the world’s current realities,” said Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

“If we want to hold on to the past, we better get eyes in the back of our head rather than on the front of our head, because we are seeing the dying of the current world order.”

… Cooperation among the great powers at the U.N. began to unravel following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and ground to a halt after Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022. Now the Security Council is deadlocked on all major issues, making the world body largely irrelevant.

… Yet it’s too early to write off the world body completely, said Michael Keating, executive director of the European Institute of Peace and a former senior U.N. diplomat in Somalia, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories.

“People may come back to the U.N.—or something very like it—having been through the pain of realizing that the U.N. may be terrible, but the alternative to it is even worse,” he said.

“I just don’t know what the alternative is, other than a dog-eat-dog world.” …”
 
Not sure where this goes, so putting it here.


Mulberry Heel said:
I still remember conservatives and bosiders on the old ZZLP confidently telling everyone for years that Roe would never be repealed, that it was settled law, and then when it was repealed they just moved the goalposts and said that it wasn't really that big of a deal, that it would just go back to the states and that women (assuming they had the money, of course) could just go to another state to get abortions. Except that some Republican states are now making traveling out of state to get an abortion a crime, along with other draconian laws that are quite literally killing women in some states like Texas. It's straight out of Gilead type stuff, but we're all told that it's really not so bad.

And now here we're being told by the same people that gay marriage and gay rights aren't in danger and not to worry (despite numerous GOP proposals and attempts to roll back said rights, as in Florida), that other minority rights aren't in danger, that contraceptive rights aren't in danger - all in spite of open GOP attempts and discussions about limiting such things. And if any of them do come to pass, I have no doubt that we'll hear the same line from Trumpers and bosiders that we did after abortion rights were rolled back - it's not so bad, it'll just go back to the states where it belongs, gay couples can always move to blue states if they still want their marriages to be recognized, blah blah blah. Disingenuousness at its finest.
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For the record, flashback 2022:

“Justice Clarence Thomas argued in a concurring opinion released on Friday that the Supreme Court “should reconsider” its past rulings codifying rights to contraception access, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage.

… In his concurring opinion, Thomas — an appointee of President George H.W. Bush — wrote that the justices “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell” — referring to three cases having to do with Americans’ fundamental privacy, due process and equal protection rights.

… it appears doubtful that many of Thomas’ conservative colleagues would be eager to revisit issues like contraception and same-sex marriage anytime soon, considering the claims in Alito’s majority opinion that the court’s ruling on Friday casts no doubt on those decisions.

Still, by declining to explicitly repudiate Thomas’ stance, his conservative colleagues provided fodder to the court’s liberal members and left-leaning critics to warn that more overrulings of precedent are on the way. …”

 


Did Donald Trump Really Just Drop a Solana Meme Coin?​

Donald Trump is promoting a Solana meme coin from his social media accounts. Elaborate hack or a truly wild new era for crypto?​


“… Degen traders bought in immediately, generating hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of trading volume as on-chain sleuths and security experts hunted for red flags. But with Trump's X and Truth Social posts still live after more than an hour, and some initial red flags cleared upon closer inspection, it appears that this is a legitimate Trump meme coin launch.

… The launch was immediately met with excitement, confusion, and plenty of skepticism. That's because the project had all the familiar hallmarks of many celebrity meme coin scams that have launched over the last year, with a public figure's social media account hijacked to promote a pump-and-dump scam.

… On-chain sleuths pointed to potential red flags, including the apparent fact that the project was seeded with millions of dollars of funds from Binance and Gate—two exchanges that don't serve U.S. customers. But some other apparent concerns diminished with further sleuthing, not to mention with time as Trump's social posts remained online.

… Meme coin traders are buying the coin in droves, pushing it to a price of $7.31 as of this writing. DexScreener lists a market cap of $7.1 billion, which would make it a top 30 cryptocurrency if accurate—though there's a caveat.

Out of 1 billion coins, the website notes that 80% are locked and will gradually be unlocked over the course of three years. As such, the circulating supply would only be 200 million tokens, putting the market cap closer to $1.5 billion as of this writing. There's been about $680 million worth of trading volume so far.

Trump ran on a pro-crypto platform, and beyond his previous NFT collections that launched between 2022 and 2024, Trump has also backed a decentralized finance platform called World Liberty Financial. …”
 
www.nytimes.com

Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump

A new poll found the public is sympathetic to the president-elect’s plans to deport migrants and reduce America’s presence overseas.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump​

A new poll found the public is sympathetic to the president-elect’s plans to deport migrants and reduce America’s presence overseas.

“… Americans are more evenly split on whether Mr. Trump should implement tariffs on countries like China and Mexico, which he has vowed to do as a way to reduce reliance on foreign goods. Still, 46 percent say that trade with foreign nations should be subject to increased tariffs.

And a large majority is sympathetic to efforts to strictly limit how doctors can treat children struggling with their gender identity — an issue Mr. Trump and other Republicans made central to their campaigns for office. Seventy-one percent said that no one under 18 should be prescribed puberty-blocking drugs or hormones. The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision on the matter later this year.

The poll tells the story of a country turning inward, where people are more aligned with Mr. Trump’s “America First” agenda than they were during his first term in office.

For a political figure so divisive — Americans view him more negatively than any other president about to take office in the last 70 years — the level of support for his ideas is striking. Most Americans say the United States has ignored serious problems at home while entangling itself in costly conflicts abroad, the poll found. A majority believe the government is sending too much money to Ukraine. And many are expressing less tolerance of immigrants overall. …”
 

Voters Want MAGA Lite From Trump, WSJ Poll Finds​

Survey shows Biden leaves office with record-low approval and a badly tarnished party​

GIFT LINK —> https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy...84?st=p8hBrZ&reflink=mobilewebshare_permalink. 🎁

“… That is the central message voters are sending in a new Wall Street Journal poll, which finds that most want a tempered, less assertive set of policies than Trump promised in the most unbridled moments of his campaign. The appetite is for MAGA lite, rather than extra-strength MAGA.

Some 53% want Trump to make significant changes in how government is run once he is inaugurated Monday. But more than 60% oppose one of his central ideas for doing so—replacing thousands of career civil-service workers with people chosen by the president.

More than 60% also oppose eliminating the Education Department, a marquee Trump proposal for paring the federal government. Only 18% would supersede congressional powers and give Trump more authority over federal spending, as he has proposed.

Similarly, the poll finds that, while voters want Trump to build his promised wall along the border with Mexico and address illegal immigration, they also want limits to his plans for sweeping deportations of undocumented immigrants. …”
 
nycfan said:

Voters Want MAGA Lite From Trump, WSJ Poll Finds​

Survey shows Biden leaves office with record-low approval and a badly tarnished party​

GIFT LINK —> https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy...84?st=p8hBrZ&reflink=mobilewebshare_permalink. 🎁

“… That is the central message voters are sending in a new Wall Street Journal poll, which finds that most want a tempered, less assertive set of policies than Trump promised in the most unbridled moments of his campaign. The appetite is for MAGA lite, rather than extra-strength MAGA.

Some 53% want Trump to make significant changes in how government is run once he is inaugurated Monday. But more than 60% oppose one of his central ideas for doing so—replacing thousands of career civil-service workers with people chosen by the president.

More than 60% also oppose eliminating the Education Department, a marquee Trump proposal for paring the federal government. Only 18% would supersede congressional powers and give Trump more authority over federal spending, as he has proposed.

Similarly, the poll finds that, while voters want Trump to build his promised wall along the border with Mexico and address illegal immigration, they also want limits to his plans for sweeping deportations of undocumented immigrants. …”
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Voters want change, but not the kind he's going to make.

They'll want more change next time. I hope the Democrats will be prepared to actually give it to them.
 

“Jake Sullivan — with three days left as White House national security adviser, with wide access to the world's secrets — called us to deliver a chilling, "catastrophic" warning for America and the incoming administration:

  • The next few years will determine whether artificial intelligence leads to catastrophe — and whether China or America prevails in the AI arms race.
Why it matters: Sullivan said in our phone interview that unlike previous dramatic technology advancements (atomic weapons, space, the internet), AI development sits outside of government and security clearances, and in the hands of private companies with the power of nation-states.

  • Underscoring the gravity of his message, Sullivan spoke with an urgency and directness that were rarely heard during his decade-plus in public life. …”
 
“…Somehow, government will have to join forces with these companies to nurture and protect America's early AI edge, and shape the global rules for using potentially God-like powers, he says.

  • U.S. failure to get this right, Sullivan warns, could be "dramatic, and dramatically negative — to include the democratization of extremely powerful and lethal weapons; massive disruption and dislocation of jobs; an avalanche of misinformation."
Staying ahead in the AI arms race makes the Manhattan Project during World War II seem tiny, and conventional national security debates small. It's potentially existential with implications for every nation and company.

  • To distill Sullivan: America must quickly perfect a technology that many believe will be smarter and more capable than humans. We need to do this without decimating U.S. jobs, and inadvertently unleashing something with capabilities we didn't anticipate or prepare for. We need to both beat China on the technology and in shaping and setting global usage and monitoring of it, so bad actors don't use it catastrophically. Oh, and it can only be done with unprecedented government-private sector collaboration — and probably difficult, but vital, cooperation with China.
"There's going to have to be a new model of relationship because of just the sheer capability in the hands of a private actor," Sullivan says. …”
 
nycfan said:

“Jake Sullivan — with three days left as White House national security adviser, with wide access to the world's secrets — called us to deliver a chilling, "catastrophic" warning for America and the incoming administration:

  • The next few years will determine whether artificial intelligence leads to catastrophe — and whether China or America prevails in the AI arms race.
Why it matters: Sullivan said in our phone interview that unlike previous dramatic technology advancements (atomic weapons, space, the internet), AI development sits outside of government and security clearances, and in the hands of private companies with the power of nation-states.

  • Underscoring the gravity of his message, Sullivan spoke with an urgency and directness that were rarely heard during his decade-plus in public life. …”
Click to expand...
When it comes to the LLM models that everyone is familiar with, open AI, Google and Facebook are at the top right now but Alibaba and a company called deepseek, both from China, are very close. I think the path that they are all taking is going to end up a commodity anyway, but I could be wrong and any one of them are a breakthrough away from changing the game. The French of all countries have two really good companies that are also in the conversation.

The US also has some of the best vision based AI companies out there.

Nvidia followed somewhat distantly by Google have the best chips out there. They are American companies while the chips are mostly manufactured in Taiwan.

I suspect the LLM models, example ChatGPT, are going to become pretty commoditized. It will take longer but I suspect the chips will be the same.

The real question is which companies and countries are able to leverage AI most effectively, ie build stuff on top of the commodity.

And of course who knows what any country is developing behind their classified walls.
 
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nycfan said:
www.nytimes.com

Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump

A new poll found the public is sympathetic to the president-elect’s plans to deport migrants and reduce America’s presence overseas.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump​

A new poll found the public is sympathetic to the president-elect’s plans to deport migrants and reduce America’s presence overseas.

“… Americans are more evenly split on whether Mr. Trump should implement tariffs on countries like China and Mexico, which he has vowed to do as a way to reduce reliance on foreign goods. Still, 46 percent say that trade with foreign nations should be subject to increased tariffs.

And a large majority is sympathetic to efforts to strictly limit how doctors can treat children struggling with their gender identity — an issue Mr. Trump and other Republicans made central to their campaigns for office. Seventy-one percent said that no one under 18 should be prescribed puberty-blocking drugs or hormones. The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision on the matter later this year.

The poll tells the story of a country turning inward, where people are more aligned with Mr. Trump’s “America First” agenda than they were during his first term in office.

For a political figure so divisive — Americans view him more negatively than any other president about to take office in the last 70 years — the level of support for his ideas is striking. Most Americans say the United States has ignored serious problems at home while entangling itself in costly conflicts abroad, the poll found. A majority believe the government is sending too much money to Ukraine. And many are expressing less tolerance of immigrants overall. …”
Click to expand...
If Republicans were actually serious about solving our "serious problems at home" it would be one thing, but they're not. Other than passing more tax cuts aimed at the wealthy they're not going to do anything serious about inflation or the high cost of housing and renting (and the resulting explosion of homelessness), growing natural disasters caused by climate change, our crumbling infrastructure, the continued decline of once-prosperous manufacturing towns, the growing gap between the wealthy and everyone else. Hell, they've just placed a bunch of wealthy plutocrats in charge but they're really interested ins solving the "serious problems we have here at home?" LOL.
 
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