> It's not safe to do this unless you have a critical mass of cars on the road capable of doing it.
You could always give those cars their own section of the road like HOV lanes. EVs were granted access to HOV lanes in California as an incentive to increase EV adoption. A similar thing could happen with a dedicated autonomous lane that has a much higher speed limit.
No, they really are no different. A legal guarantee doesn't actually mean the car is safe, it means they will pay for it when the safety features fail. Those fees paid out can just be considered a marketing expense to make the car appear safer.
This is misinterpreting what I'm saying. I'm not arguing for the safety of Tesla's system. I'm saying that judging the safety based off of corporate marketing decisions is a mistake and putting a guarantee on a product is a marketing decision.
Even if this originated as a marketing thought bubble, there's no way that such a decision could've been made without direct approval from the executive (including the CEO), and only after taking advice from their general counsel and consulting with the board. The potential reputational damage is too immense for such a decision to be made by "marketing" alone. What you're describing has happened before and the courts awarded massive punitive damages against the motor company.
Yes, they are different. The degree depends on the company and if they have a history of trying to weasel out, but a legal agreement makes it harder to dodge liability in court.
Tesla would love to offer the reassurance to buyers but there’s a reason they haven’t done so: they’d lose money on it.
You are failing to understand what I'm saying. They don't have to weasel out of legal liability in court. They just bake the legal settlements they know they will have to pay into their marketing budget.
Has no one watched Fight Club and heard the anecdote about how a company will only recall a car if the cost of the recall is lower than the cost of settling all the lawsuits? All this guarantee tells us is that Mercedes did a similar calculation. Taking legal liability is not proof the car is safe. It is proof that they think the value of customers thinking the car is safe is more valuable than the cost of paying out settlements. Tesla not making the guarantee does not prove their cars are unsafe. It is evidence that if they did the same calculation, that got a different result. Maybe that is because the car is more dangerous, but it could also just be a different marketing philosophy and Tesla notably does not approach marketing like most other car companies.
The conclusion that you reached in which the Mercedes is safer than the Tesla is valuable to Mercedes and that opinion was indirectly purchased by Mercedes paying out legal settlements.
Yes, we know that companies exist to make money. My point is simply that when they are willing to make a stronger legal commitment in a country famous for litigation it suggests that they have a higher confidence level in their system.
Think about it like this: company A says “our government product is military-grade. We have a 1 year warranty.” while company B also says their product is tough but offers a 5 year warranty. Which one do you think has better data supporting the durability of their product?
That scene is a reference to Grimshaw vs Ford Motor Co.
The precedents set in that case mean that the liabilities arising out of legal action based on 'strict liability' are likely to be extremely punitive (these days, well upwards of the $147M awarded against Ford in 1980, and into the billions). Any company that did not factor such a payment in their calculation in addition to the indirect costs of reputational damage, deserves everything they get. I doubt this is the case with Mercedes.
One question I do have that perhaps someone here will know - is the Mercedes guarantee limited to certain locales? e.g. Germany only as the roads there are in good condition and well marked? (I'm assuming here).
Yes, and them putting their money where their mouth is means they are reasonably certain the accidents wont eclipse the profits, which is a much better signal than whatever Tesla marketing is putting out, seeing as they're not able/willing to do the same.
Those goalposts moved pretty fast from "sleep while it drives me to work" which I can do today to the extreme of being able to drive "Anywhere in the world under any conditions". And I see no reason to believe "all of the nearby vehicles on the road communicating" is the solution to bridging that gap.
Reread my original comment or even just the that short seven word quote you have right there. Notice that key word "me". I was speaking about myself in the present tense, not "people... all over the planet during all seasons".
>It sounded like he hadn't anticipated how much of a hassle it is to charge on road trips.
A few years ago this was true, but now that Tesla has opened up their network of chargers, your destination probably has to be >100 miles away from most interstate highways before road trip charging becomes much of an issue.
Even if there are charging stations every ten miles along the exact route you were already planning to take, it’s just straightforwardly true that it’s more annoying to charge vs. get gas.
I can fill my tank and be back on the road in <5 minutes in most cases, and I only have to do that once every 350 miles.
With an EV, I would be stopping anywhere from 10-30minutes (depending on the kinds of chargers available) (assuming I don’t have to wait for one to open up), and I’d be doing it twice as often.
It adds a very meaningful amount of time to long car trips.
Yes it's straightforwardly true that road trip charging is less convenient than with gas cars.
But charging for regular use is dramatically better. Anytime you're not on a road trip, you spend essentially no time fueling. Just plug in at night like you do with other electronics.
So I'll take saving 15 mins every week avoiding the gas station, in exchange for the couple times a year I have to wait an extra 15 mins charging.
Note that if your hybrid is a plug-in hybrid then you might get the best of both worlds.
On long road trips you get the fast re-energizing of a gas car.
For regular use if your plug in every night there is a good chance you can do most of your driving in EV mode. Current plug-in hybrids often have EV mode ranges of 40+ miles.
This is what someone I know with a RAV4 Prime reports. They plug in at night and it seems to mostly use the battery. It does sometime use the ICE but it is infrequently enough that they have only had to put more gas in every few months.
But you don’t really. You get a weak drive train as many moving parts as an ICE plus a non-trivial size battery that is expensive to replace. Your maintenance costs potential are as a bad as an ICE plus an EV. EVs are way more elegant solutions, simpler, better performance. Also, EVs are improving rapidly, charging speed and range keep getting better.
Hybrids done well actually have fewer moving parts than ICEs. They eliminate some systems (alternator and starter motor for example) and greatly simplify others (transmission).
I have a RAV4 Prime (decided to get that instead of a Tesla) and I absolutely love it. It's the best of all worlds for my use case (mostly <40mi daily commute entirely on battery, occasional longer drives that use gas). I often go months+ without refilling the gas tank, and it charges overnight from empty. And, it's clearly Toyota quality in terms of implementation.
He was having buyer's remorse for choosing a BEV over a PHEV. The PHEV is better on road trips and just as good at commuting. It loses on maintenance but probably still comes out ahead on TCO.
I think this is overstated. My Ford EV gets ~300 miles. If I leave my home with a full charge, I can get ~500 miles with ~30 minutes of charging. If a ~30 minute break in the middle of an ~8 hour drive is a problem for you, you probably aren't a safe driver. There is a reason that truckers have mandatory breaks. A person shouldn't be driving all day nonstop.
Really? Maybe my knowledge of EV ranges is way out of wack. I was assuming avg ranges look much more like ~200mi on a full battery in real-world conditions, and that a 30-min charge usually only gets you 80%. Sounds like I’m at least somewhat misinformed.
I tend to get better range than that, I'd like to claim it is my driving style, but more realistically it is because I live in Southern California so the battery is generally at ideal temperature, I often don't need heat/AC, and probably most importantly I'm not sure if I have ever driven 70+ mph for 300 consecutive miles without hitting traffic.
Also when I do road trips, I'll tend to do multiple shorter stops which according to that link means I'm closer to the "optimum charging area" than going 10%-80% in one sitting, so that might have caused me to overshoot that estimate a little.
So beyond that slight amendment of switching that one ~30 minute charging stop to two ~15 minute stops, the answer to ketzo's question is "yes, really", but as the saying goes, your mileage may vary.
An underdiscussed frustrating aspect of this whole era is that there is never any true retrospection. There is no adjustment in the credibility of the people who predicted exactly how things would play out or the people whose predictions ended up being incredibly wrong. If there is a lack of consequence for being wrong, it ends up meaning there won't be any consequences for maliciously lying in the moment knowing it's only a matter of time until they are proven wrong because when that day comes, they have already moved onto some other lie and the cycle continues.
I think the retrospection should be why the massive influx was allowed to happen between 2020 to 2024. Because it did happened before, so it's not like we didn't know this will/can happen. There should be massive increase in processing of claims. Not extrajudciary deporting people. Why would somebody predict extrajudicial deporting if that hasn't happened before?
>There's a poor child that's being withheld access to their medication and to their oncologists, and the adults in the room—adults in uniforms, adults with guns, adults in suits and adults in black robes—all of these adults are doing their adult things with their adult words, and the sum total of all that is the child still is without their cancer medicine.
People like to blame these sort of situations on leadership and systems, but every individual involved in this is making a personal choice to let this happen.
Even if you agree with the general motivations and principles behind these, do you not have the humanity to realize the absurdity and cruelness of what is being done in some of these examples? No special accommodation can be made to get the kid with cancer their medicine while they are in custody?
I genuinely don't know how those questions can be answered any other way than "cruelty is the point" and if that is your response, I don't know how you sleep at night.
> every individual involved in this is making a personal choice to let this happen.
To be fair, you and I are involved. I'm on vacation in Mexico. You're presumably also doing something comfortable. We've had, in the span of days, a judge arrested in her court room and multiple U.S. citizens--children, no less---illegally detained and deported.
It's blowing my mind to say this. But the right is clearly using violence as a political tactic. That means there is not only legitimacy, but necessity, in the opposition to begin deploying violence as a political tactic as well. (By this I mean disrupting infrastructure, interfering with law enforcement, disrupting lawmaking, et cetera. Break their cars. Hack their systems. Block their streets and maybe cause damage to their buildings. Under no circumstances do I mean causing physical harm to anyone.)
ICE "abruptly terminated" a phone call with the detained mother "when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number". The brown shirts [1] are here.
This is mental. Game you seen the amount of illegal stuff the current administration have done that results in zero arrests? There is bad faith and then there is this argument. As if the role of law is even being remotely adhered to by the current regime.
Things are moving closer and closer to a civil war. Occupying and destroying government property is where the military get called in. Shots will be fired and that will be the flame that ignites the powder keg. A lot of children will die, and even more will grow up in an endless cycle of death.
If people of the past would have followed that argument, we would not have seen the declaration of human rights of the French Revolution, not have had the civil war, slaves might still be slaves. Hitler’s successors would reign Europe.
Sometimes good people have to do what is necessary, even when it means to make things worse initially.
No, are we in such a moment now? I don’t know, but that’s the problem, right? You never know at the time.
When it come to Hitler people will generally approve of political assassinations and infanticide if it would have meant that Hitler were killed before world war 2. Any benefit that society would have gain if those methods would had been established as the norm would however be dwarfed from the negatives. Sometimes bad methods make things initially better, but long term has terrible consequences.
As a minor historical perspective. The French Revolution is know in Europe as one of the bloodiest period in France under the name of Reign of Terror, and ended with Napoleon who then initiated the Napoleonic Wars, which is also know as one of the biggest war in Europe.
> Sometimes good people have to do what is necessary, even when it means to make things worse initially.
> No, are we in such a moment now? I don’t know, but that’s the problem, right? You never know at the time.
The other problem is that literal Hitler thought the exact same thing, which is why Mein Kampf got written in a prison.
I wonder if the people four years ago chanting to hang Trump's VP (for accepting having lost the election) also thought they were in the right…
(Not that it matters either way if those people are "mistake theory" (power) rather than "conflict theory" (truth), because I expect all clothes to eventually be worn by various conflict theorists).
Why is it that this mantra is only ever employed to discourage opposition, but never to explain the logical consequence of violence employed by the government?
> Why is it that this mantra is only ever employed to discourage opposition, but never to explain the logical consequence of violence employed by the government?
Every individual involved in this is doing it because there is something to be gained. The system is basically saying “the more you deport, the more numbers you generate, the more funding you get and the less I will check what you do with it”. We can blame the individuals sure, but if they keep getting showered with money for doing the wrong thing, of course the system has a big responsibility. Why should the people involved not do this if they are being explicitly encouraged by their employer to do it?
Based on some interactions I have had with CBP and ICE in the past as a legal immigrant, I'm confident that many of those people aren't doing it because of any sort of monetary gain or career advancement, but simply because it gives them an outlet to realize their sadistic tendencies.
And because is tolerated and even encouraged, these jobs attract exactly those kinds of people. Which is how you end up with an organization with an internal culture that revels in human suffering.
That seems like a very landbased mindset. From a high level, what is an ocean but a thick atmosphere? I could even imagine an underwater culture would be quicker to explore because they would surely discover the surface of the ocean quicker than we discovered the concept of the atmosphere and that innately leads to the questions of whether the atmosphere has a "surface" and what is above it.
This still seems to be based on assumptions coming from our own history and situation. I don't know why some hypothetical species needs fire for chemistry or even metallurgy for that matter or why an underwater civilization couldn't eventually discover fire themselves. There is also the potential that our reliance on combustion based rocketry is actually a crutch preventing us further space exploration considering how impractical it seems for interstellar travel.
Chemistry and reactions would absolutely still be a thing. Reactions happen underwater all the time such as the complex decay of organic matter.
The fire meta get's postponed until trapping air inside bags happens (could be seaweed/skin based bags).
Then you need to make a habit of collecting a bunch of air and trapping it and then can begin exploring chemical reactions in the air.
ex: take dead but not decomposed organic matter, dry it out in hot air bag (maybe cover the bag in black squid ink and float the bag of air in the ocean out in the sun's rays for day to warm it up.
Then eventually you need to have the insight to do friction based experiments in the bag with dried materials and then one discovers fire in a massive breakthrough not dissimilar to when humans created Bose Einstein Condensates for the first time in highly specialized environments.
Nothing here says "impossible" to me. I bet if whales had fingers to easily manipulate matter they might've already done all this by now.
While I agree that there is no logical reason that underwater organisms could not become highly intelligent or advance to the level of doing experiments with fire, it is clear that being underwater is an additional barrier.
As such, the number of intelligent underwater civilizations, that could get near our present level of advancement, would likely be significantly lower. Not impossible (because of how large the universe is), but some order of magnitude, less possible.
> While I agree that there is no logical reason that underwater organisms could not become highly intelligent or advance to the level of doing experiments with fire, it is clear that being underwater is an additional barrier.
Meanwhile, a few thousand lightyears away, some sort of talking crab is rubbishing the idea that industrial civilisation could arise on land; after all, they wouldn't even have access to hydrothermal vents! What would they do for energy, burn plants?
(I really think we're inclined to build a _lot_ of unwarranted assumptions into what industrial civilisation has to look like and how you have to get there, because it's what we did.)
> As such, the number of intelligent underwater civilizations, that could get near our present level of advancement, would likely be significantly lower.
Unless of course, having opposable thumbs and >50 year lifespan and intelligence in the water causes you to go through a completely different developmental path than land based creatures. We just don't know.
Why so complicated? There could be many 'mini-labs' in underwater caves, accidental discovery of inverse diving bell so to speak. With trapped gases of any sort, by whichever process(volcanism?) pushing the water out downwards, while unable to escape upwards. Ready to explore, and mess around with. Maybe even in something like free floating coral reefs. Or below the ice.
Why is fire the only chemical pathway to metallurgy?
Can they not discover fire in underwater caves?
Can they not build underwater containers that hold the necessary materials to do chemistry, similar to what we do with bioreactors, flasks, beakers, and pressure vessels?
To support this: Oceans are more conducive to exploration due to their natural currents and lack of mountainous regions or rivers which inhibit movement.
Like the comment below was getting at: if you are water bound, you are very unlikely to discover or become proficient with fire, which to us, as if now seems like a requirement to travel through space.
There’s also the massive weight disadvantage water has compared to “air”.
So no fire and have to travel with a water filled rocket instead.
But again maybe these are just land centered views.
Maybe you can just inject oxygen into the water that merely surrounds your head.
And maybe there’s a hydrogen power rocket that is more efficient than our fire ones.
For traditional rockets, it's not so much fire, as it is the rapid expansion of matter and the force that it generates. Fire just happens to be the most convenient method for us.
There could be metals under an ocean that could be mined. An underwater civilization could potentially harness nuclear power.
I don't think this is a great argument. Crabs and lobsters have claws which are almost hand like. And Octopus have tentacles, which can be highly manipulative. So those limbs must give those creatures an advantage even in water. It wouldn't be too much of a leap from those appendages to something as good as hands.
> Hands wouldn't give a fish any advantage, because there is nothing to climb.
The ocean floor has plenty of stuff to dig into, pick up, and manipulate, along with un-anchored things like mats of seaweed.
> Land animals are more likely to develop hands.
I can easily imagine sea-creatures making the same kinds of assumptions in reverse: "Sir Blub-blub, while this hypothesis of 'land' animals is indeed intriguing, they would undoubtedly be primitive, far less likely to develop intelligent grabbers. After all, there will be nothing worth grabbing but hard 'dry' rocks! They wouldn't even be useful for propulsion, given the intangibility of this 'air'."
This all pre-supposes that evolution will lock alien organisms into a specific and static body configuration on other planets like it has done to organisms on Earth.
Is there any particular reason why an intelligent organism couldn't evolve to be able to grow and change its body into any arbitrary size and shape that it wanted to merely by thinking about it?
Perhaps aliens from another planet would consider our limitation as four limbed bipedal organisms to be absurd.
Why can't organisms chose to grow eight hands each with 16 opposable digits?
> This all pre-supposes that evolution will lock alien organisms into a specific and static body configuration on other planets like it has done to organisms on Earth.
It's pretty normal for organisms to have drastically different body configurations through their lives. e.g moths
Though I'm not aware of any that have choices to make in the process.
Edit: actually lots of organisms can "choose" to change their sex
Genuinely wondering why so many people are still giving the Trump administration this much benefit of the doubt that their moves are strategically sound? We're really still doing the whole "3D chess" thing with this guy after he has shown over and over again that he mostly just acts on impulse and the primary qualification for his advisors is loyalty over any type of intelligence or expertise?
I dunno. Somebody literally wrote a guidebook for him to follow, but I haven't even glanced over it.
The stuff I've seen people quote from the book have all been stupid, but the kind of stupidity seems to be a "do X, so you'll get Y" where "Y" is really bad and the author thinks it's good. So I guess I do expect some kind of coherence from him.
That said, I don't remember anybody claiming Project 25 talks about tariffs.
I don't think that Trump himself is competent, but I'm not be so sure about the people around him. The effort it took to put him above the law was at least a decade in the making, so clearly someone knows what they're doing.
I don't think it's a coincidence, for instance, that Steve Banon's strategy of "flooding the zone" looks exactly as the type of chaos currently coming from the White House.
> Genuinely wondering why so many people are still giving the Trump administration this much benefit of the doubt that their moves are strategically sound?
Since I'm one of 'those people' who's been willing to grant Trump some benefit of the doubt in the past, I'll respond with my take. tl;dr Trump's handling of the tariffs have been such disaster, there's simply no possibility it was based on a strategically sound plan. So, in answer to your question, this episode has caused me to substantially foreclose my prior willingness to grant Trump some benefit of the doubt.
To be clear, while I've tried to remain open-minded re: Trump I've never felt that he's especially smart and certainly not someone I'd ever personally like or hang out with but I'm also one of those contrarians who doesn't think every politician or public figure needs to be someone I personally like or approve of in a moral sense. I've also been willing to concede that some things done by the executive branch during his first term were generally positive (whether because of or in spite of Trump isn't clear). I also think his policies and statements have been subject to an unprecedented degree of negative spin in the media - sometimes well-deserved but always hyped overwhelmingly to the negative. So I made an effort to look past the constant headlines of, essentially, "orange man bad in all possible ways." I also decided to ignore Trump's own bizarrely extreme pronouncements and focus only on what he really put into practice and, most importantly, the tangible real-world impact of those actions on the broad population and economy over time (not the extrapolated predictions in the media).
However, even to me, how he's handled this tariff thing has been a complete shit show. I've spent a fair bit of time trying to understand the various explanations, contextualizations and even 'hidden grand plan' theories proposed by some and they simply aren't plausible. It's not a 'master negotiator strategy' because he asked for concessions but never made any concrete proposals of quid pro quo. There was no attempt at serious negotiation with most major trading partners (according to the WSJ) and thus no possibility of meaningful deals.
Now suddenly (somewhat) reversing course like this a few days after going so extreme and then publicly doubling down on his long-term commitment to the 'grand strategy' is unbelievably damaging to any remaining shred of credibility his administration may have had. It nukes any possibility that he was doing a 'crazy guy on the subway' strategy of punching his adversaries in the face and making them believe he was so nuts he'd saw off his own arm just to keep beating them over the head with it - all to cleverly convince them to make meaningful concessions they'd never make any other way. Yeah, well now that he blinked in less than a week, nothing he can do will ever make them believe that. I mean, if that was the plan, it was a terrible plan and poorly executed to boot, but flipping like this is even worse.
All I can figure is that it was a 'crazy guy' plan but that he intended to keep it going for several months and then, when his opponents were bloodied enough he'd open negotiations and "win" in a master stroke. Except he completely miscalculated the degree of economic destruction he'd cause in U.S. markets and has now had to not only fold but reveal he was playing a weak bluff all along. I'm struggling to come up with any way this could have been worse for the U.S. and Trump's interests. After this, it's hard to imagine any trading partner negotiating in good faith, or perhaps, at all with Trump over tariffs in the next 90 days. The only rational strategy for them is to play along and gather info while conceding nothing meaningful and simply wait and see what Trump's ultimately going to do long term.
As far as I'm concerned, I bent over backward to grant Trump some benefit of the doubt and give him a chance to prove himself but the tariffs have been so bungled they're impossible to put it in any positive light. So far, it appears to be an epic disaster of hubris and naive miscalculation.
Is it possible that Trump is just a stupid person? That he genuinely believes the tariffs will be good, that he's being influenced by stupid people (Navarro) that believe this, and that the reaction of bond markets that didn't follow his overly simplistic model made him hit the brakes?
> the reaction of bond markets that didn't follow his overly simplistic model made him hit the brakes?
It's pretty clear that's essentially what happened. The question is how, why and what Trump's plan was.
> Is it possible that Trump is just a stupid person?
I don't think a simple linear scale between "Stupid" <---> "Smart" is a useful model for predicting likely job performance in complex, multi-function roles. Reality is far more complicated and nuanced. Whether assessing an employee, CEO, politician or spouse, just using an IQ test (or any other single point measure on one dimension) yields only an approximate directional indicator. It's certainly not the optimal model because it's entirely possible for an employee, CEO, politician or spouse who scores meaningfully lower on an intelligence test to substantially outperform a higher scorer in real-world results on the broad composite of job, leadership, governance or spousal metrics you care about.
I've read Trump's "Art of the Deal" book. He thinks he's a gifted negotiator based on the success he had in negotiating commercial real estate deals. However, commercial real estate deals are generally a pretty narrowly specific kind of deal structure. They tend to each be one-off, transactional arrangements which hinge on accurately estimating the value which can be extracted over time from a property and the future performance of the market in that ___location. Then forming a one-time consortium of financial backers willing to provide the capital on terms which will allow the operator to make a profit. While the amounts can be large and horizons long, these are fairly simple deals with only a few unknown dependent variables everyone is estimating the value of their position on. It's a bit like poker in some ways. It's a bid, counter-bid type of structure with only a few sellers and a few buyers at the table at any given time and each seller is offering something different enough that it's not a true commodity. There's hidden information but the ___domain is constrained and the unknowns are known. The bidding process reveals some information about how each player has assessed the value of their hand. They can either have a truly strong hand, be bluffing or somewhere in-between.
This is why I think Trump is ill-suited to directly managing complex, multi-dimensional geopolitical negotiations. They are profoundly different. There's far more hidden information, the ___domain is nearly unconstrained, there are unknown unknowns. However, not being good at negotiating these kinds of deals isn't necessarily a problem for a president. There have been a lot of presidents who've done well in geopolitical negotiations who were similarly ill-suited. They did well because they were good at selecting talent to manage those processes, setting high-level objectives and meta-managing those processes against broad political objectives and policies (Reagan would be an example). The fundamental problem with Trump is that he thinks he's good at all types of negotiation AND that it's important to his self-image to be perceived as directly involved and instrumental in 'winning'. The final nail, as it were, is that it's pretty clear Trump's default model in negotiations, politics, legal strategy, financial deals, etc tends to be "win/lose" vs at least starting out seeking a "win/win". Complicating this is that his projected self-image seeks to be publicly acknowledged as winning by beating his opponent.
This is a bad scenario because every counter-party in geopolitical trade negotiations has a far more detailed psych analysis than what I wrote that's been prepared by experts who've read everything Trump's ever said or written publicly. While Trump's actions in any given moment are certainly unpredictable, that's not generally a good thing. Especially because his internal priorities, self-image and emotional dynamics appear pretty easy to read and fairly predictable. Whether they're right or not, the counter-parties almost certainly believe they have a fairly solid take on Trump's psychological drivers. Appearing "scrutible" wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing (in fact it could be quite good), except that these psych evals are both high-confidence AND they say Trump is unpredictable, sometimes acts out emotionally, is swayed by personal loyalty over strategy, can perceive negative outcomes as personal attacks, reflexively seeks retribution for personal attacks, is strongly influenced by the immediate feedback of a couple dozen people and has few strongly-held philosophical or political premises. Whether all of these things are entirely true or not doesn't much matter. Trump has projected them so consistently over so many decades others believe they're true.
That's why when Trump said yesterday that he intends to personally be "deeply involved" in the negotiations with trading partners, I sighed. He has virtually no credibility as someone willing to stick by any framework that might be developed in private negotiations. He also has no patience for the long, painstaking process involved. No matter how good the Treasury and State negotiating teams are, their own boss has convinced the counter-parties that these teams have little real influence or ability to strike a deal. To me, that means the odds of any meaningful deals being negotiated where counter-parties are willing to 'horse trade' elements of significant value is between slim and none.
That's not it at all. I'm sure there's lots of sycophants out there, but a lot of people just don't find "he's stupid and it's random" a satisfying explanation for his actions, even if they disagree with them.
That's weird, cause they sure smeared millions of people real fast as undesirables trans/illegals/DEI/woke, but Trump gets a million chances and coup do-overs and please explain take your time sir: What is the amazing 4D strategy behind telling people to drink bleach?
Nepotism feels good all the way until it sinks your company.
A lot of this stuff is on a YouTube education level, not even a degree. I would be shocked if the US does not have a bunch of economic advisors who tell them what problems there are and what should be done. They've probably mapped out all the next steps. Most US presidents are Harvard-level smart, but the White House has been around long enough to find a way to deliver reports to the simpler ones.
There's a lot of obvious big problems - confidence in the USD, debt rising faster than GDP can catch up, military overextension, China's rise outpacing US, inequality, inaccessible education and health care, opioid crisis, etc.
Trump has a good eye for identifying this - that's why he won the election despite all his weaknesses. It's clear he knows some of this but doesn't understand it - his comments on a BRICS currency, for example. Yes, a "BRICS currency" would threaten Pax Americana but it's on literally nobody's mind.
I feel like, if anything, he's an overplanner. A smarter leader would think, these moves will have unplanned side effects. Trump makes a lot of roundabout moves like DOGE. These moves have a target, but he hasn't thought about the side effects. And when a crisis like COVID hits, it disrupts the complex plans, which is why he reacts so poorly to them.
<< I would be shocked if the US does not have a bunch of economic advisors who tell them
Oh, US does have its share of economic advisors[1] of all stripes. And, I would love to be corrected on this, when SHTF, they immediately argue for NOT the very thing they normally argue for. They can tell what should be done for sure.. just not when it comes to their money..
(edit)Therein lies the issue or at least a part of the it.
Trump is famous for ad libbing and making up whatever he wants in the moment. His first administration was not prepared to govern. I'm not sure how this is seen as over planning.
This just reads like pure fantasy to me. Have you not seen the account from numerous former Cabinet and White House officials about how lazy and incurious he is or how difficult it is to get him to read the reports put in front of him? Have you missed the way he has forced countless career officials out of the government through layoffs, firings, or pushing people to resign in protest? I don’t even know what to say to the idea that Trump is an “overplanner”, you even literally said “he hasn't thought about the side effects” a few sentences later. That’s “overplanning”?
I don't know how that is supposed to work or counts as an "overplanner". That sounds to me more like someone who has goals but doesn't actually have a plan on how to reach that goal.
How confident are we that there is a "next administration... four years from now"? I don't know what the number is, but it ain't 100% like it used to be.
You could always give those cars their own section of the road like HOV lanes. EVs were granted access to HOV lanes in California as an incentive to increase EV adoption. A similar thing could happen with a dedicated autonomous lane that has a much higher speed limit.
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