AppleZulu

kellie said:

hmurchison said:

30 years ago people took the the streets in states across the US to protest the move towards globalization with protests agains NAFTA  and WTO and now the predictable results are here and the US politicians most who were adults back in the mid 90s themselves are telling the citizens they should pay more for what their mistake.   There is no accountability for what was an obvious bad move.  Citizens did not cause the trade imbalance in fact it cost us in lost jobs. 

Bush started NAFTA, but Clinton signed it into law.  Obama worked the the Trans Pacific Partnership, so he was no fan of keeping manufacturing jobs in the US.  Did these politicians really believe in these programs? Or were they after big political donations?  Biden did nothing for the average American worker. As I see it Trump is the only politician who’s given a darn about the American worker. 

Trump sure gives it a lot of lip service, but then makes millions selling Chinese-made bibles and next up a Chinese made phone, both wrapped in the American flag and gilded with his branding. Now he’s pushing tariffs that increase prices for American workers, while seeking deals that undermine any premise that this is about protecting or creating American jobs. Next up, his budget bill that cuts services and protections for average Americans while cutting taxes even more for corporations and very wealthy individuals. It baffles me when people look at this guy whose whole identity is wrapped up in being conspicuously wealthy and who has a long history as a “businessman” of stiffing contractors and small businesses, and think, “this guy really cares about American workers.”  

Xed said:

mentorsemblem said:

AppleZulu said:

Trade deficits were nowhere on anyone’s radar during the election that took place only months ago. Nobody voted for this.

While campaigning for his second term as US president, Trump pledged even larger tariffs than his first term, including 60% on China, 100% on Mexico, and 20% on all other countries. He also proposed tariffs to penalize US companies that outsourced manufacturing, such as a 200% tariff on John Deere.

....
- Universal baseline tariffs on most foreign products, which will increase incrementally if other countries manipulate their currency or "otherwise engage in unfair trading practices", and lowering taxes. Revoking China's Most Favored Nation trade status, gradually stopping all Chinese imports of essential goods, stopping American companies from investing in China, and banning federal contracts for any company that outsources to China.
- Decreasing trade deficits, especially with China.
....

That was a lot of revisionist history from AppleZulu. Not sure I'd call 8 calendar months "only months ago" based on the context of his comment. Use any search engine with a date before the election and you'll find countless articles and videos on how Trump doesn't understand tariffs and how actual experts with business, finance, and economics say this will hurt the US.

Trade was at the bottom among issues concerning 2024 voters. There was no urgency. 

Stabitha_Christie said:

9secondkox2 said:

avidthinker said:

9secondkox2 said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

9secondkox2 said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

9secondkox2 said:

Interesting article. 

As we’ve seen in this admin, things are always in motion and never stuck in the mud. 

So we will see how these deals turn out for the long term benefit of America. 

But one thing is for certain: something msjor had to be done. Constantly losing ground to other nations was not sustainable. Sure, you might get a cheaper iPhone today, but you may not even be able to get an iPhone tomorrow. 

I’ll take long term over short term any day. 

Except, there's no long-term gain to be had, and just more wealth shifting up away from the middle class to the upper on this path.

If he really wanted to restore manufacturing to the US, he'd fund education to the maximum extent possible. We do not have the manufacturing manpower base or educated populace needed to do this!

He and his party are doing the opposite.

"Things are always in motion" is not a good thing for international trade relations or US businesses that don't know what to expect, or budget for, on a day-to-day basis.

It’s been 5 months. And the tarriffs less than that. And deals still in motion. Can hardly conclude what you’re saying from that. 

Is it possible it doesn’t work as hoped? Sure. We live in an uncertain and imperfect world full of people acting in bad faith, etc. but is it worth a shot? 100%. The alternative is to continue to decline. One way it’s much closer to certainty of success is if one group of people stop attacking the guy every time he breathes, and gets behind what’s obviously a noble goal, things would go much smoother and have a better outcome. 

Manpower is fully available. Have you looked at the unemployment rates? Education is a matter of training. Unfortunately, much of what passes for education today has little to do with reading, writing, and arithmetic. That’s thanks to a partisan led federal education department. The states do a better job. Almost anyone can learn how to do repetitive things, no matter how detailed. The key is starting. Sure it takes time. But it never happens unless you start. A lot of unemployed people today would love to have these jobs. 

Things being in motion refers to the agility of the current admin and their near unprecedented ability to pivot in an instant, constantly evaluating and executing. Not just rolling with something bevause they already were heading in that direction. If it’s not advancing favorably, the smart thing to do is pivot. And keeping things in motion also helps guard against letting bad faith heads of state pin them down to bad deals. 

China is tough. Bevause of the usa pressing the “easy button” decades ago, we have built up an enemy into being a major force on the world stage. It will not be easy to wean off of the “cheap” Chinese manufacturing, but it will be the wise thing to get started on. If not, the ISA will just keep declining until it’s no longer the superpower it has been. If the answer is not what the President is doing, it’s certainly not also the status quo - or worse, pouring even more money into our adversaries - or even other economies in general. 

Bold and italics mine. This is a ridiculous assessment of what this administration does. Fire, Ready, Fire, with no "aim" step and a "ready, fire" sequence out of order is no way to run a global trade program, much less a lemonade stand. There's no plan. There's just a hope that this will work, and design to shift money up and out of the middle class.

I'm with you on "China is tough." But, that's about all in this few paragraphs that I agree with. High tech US manufacturing that the CHIPS act started is not going well, and that's been years. The US has been cutting funding to education in a bipartisan effort for half a century. No education effort. No "Almost anyone can learn how to do repetitive things, no matter how detailed" effort.

Look up "No child left behind" and where we are now, and which administration started the requirement to educate for tests, not for learning, and tell me it's a partisan-led federal education department. The states do not do a better job, and there's no realistic way you can say that.

Penalizing US businesses and therefore US consumers to do this isn't the way to do it. Not funding education and further cutting for the umpteenth time with the big beautiful bill is not the way to do it.

Could it work? Maybe. Is it likely to? No.

It's more likely to crush small businesses in favor of the big ones, and drive the middle class deeper into debt.

While I tend to agree on msny of your other topics, It’s obvious we disagree fundamentally on most of not all things related to the current administration. 

I’ll agree to disagree. As far as who turns out to be right? We shall see. 

The tariffs are a complete and total disaster, bruh.

But I gotta say that I really enjoy seeing you twist your brain into a mental pretzel trying to rationalize the decisions of someone who "doesn't know what the fuck they're doing." (TacoMan's words, not mine)

The only mental acrobatics are coming from the side pretending this didn’t need to be done. No ine said it would be easy or quick. Just that it is a much needed beginning to strengthen our standing. 

When you have to lie and make false statements the. You are most certainly the person doing mental acrobatics. That you can’t make your case without falsehoods only understanding how weak your argument is. You would get a lot further if  engaged in an intellectually honest discussion. 

There is an interesting partial parallel to the actions of supporters of President Biden during his term, and now supporters of Trump during his. Biden supporters tried hard to gloss over his age related issues, particularly trying to explain away gaffes, fumbles and incoherence when Biden was speaking, claiming in the face of clear evidence otherwise that Biden was vigorous and energetic as ever. Now we have our friend here doing the same for President Trump while we can all see that the wannabe empower is naked as a jay bird, and not in a pretty way.

The difference, of course, is that while Biden himself was faltering, the big policies his administration was putting forth were solid. Biden supporters were mainly fearful that his age created a vulnerability that could lead to Trump’s reelection, which it did. That notwithstanding, while Trump 45’s infrastructure bill was always two weeks away, Biden passed a generational infrastructure bill that still has Republican members of Congress who voted against it showing up to groundbreakings and ribbon-cuttings in their districts, pretending they were all for it. After Putin invaded Ukraine, Biden pulled NATO back together (after Trump weakened and threatened to pull the US out) with such strength that Russia still hasn’t achieved the win that they thought would only take a few weeks. (Both sadly and darkly hilariously, NATO leaders finally figured out that heaping praise and compliments on Trump was all it takes to get him to flip and suddenly support the alliance, at least for now.)

Now we have our friend here ..trying not only to attribute coherence where there is none not only to the person, but to the policies and administration. It’s not just that President Trump can’t coherently explain his tariff policy in speeches or to the press, it’s that the policy itself is every bit as incoherent as he is, and that his cabinet and lieutenants were all selected for loyalty, not expertise or competence, and are thus attempting to implement whatever he says at the moment, which is why the policies are as incoherent as the president.

So here, as the reality of inconsistency and incoherence becomes nearly impossible to explain away, our friend applies we shall see brand lipstick to that pig and then leans hard on the urgency that something had to be done, and at least this is something. That of course falls apart, too, because there was no urgency required here. Trade deficits were nowhere on anyone’s radar during the election that took place only months ago. Nobody voted for this. In fact, they voted for the opposite: economic stability and lower prices in the face of lingering inflation. There was no international incident or economic crisis since November that suddenly made urgent trade policy action necessary. No, the whole tariff regime is a product of Donald Trump’s mind, either as an obsession, or as a distraction from other, even more awful things his administration is doing, or most likely, both. There’s just no explaining any of that away. 

In a nutshell, this explains why Apple is “behind” with AI, but actually isn’t. 

It’s remarkable the consistency with which this pattern repeats, yet even people who consider themselves Apple enthusiasts don’t see it. Tech competitors “race ahead” with an iteration of some technology, while Apple seemingly languishes. Apple is doomed. Then Apple comes out “late” with their version of it, and the initial peanut gallery reception pronounces it too little, too late.

Then within a couple of years, Apple’s version is the gold standard and the others -those cutting-edge innovators- race to catch up, because “first” is often also “half-baked.”

In the news this week, it was exposed that RFK Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” report was evidently an AI-produced document, replete with hallucinations, most notably in the bibliography, and of course it was. This is what happens when the current cohort of AI models are uncritically used to produce a desired result, without any understanding of how profoundly bad these AI models are. When I read about this in the news, I decided to experiment with it myself. Using MS Copilot -in commercial release as part of MS Word- I picked a subject and asked for a report taking a specific, dubious position on it, with citations and a bibliography. After it dutifully produced the report, I started checking the bibliography, and one after another, failed to find the research papers that Copilot used to back the position taken. I didn’t check all the references, so it’s possible some citations were real, but finding several that weren’t was sufficient to bin the whole thing. It’s bad enough when humans intentionally produce false and misleading information, but when a stock office product will do it for you with no disclaimers or warnings, should that product really be on the market? I also once asked ChatGPT to write a story about green eggs and ham, in the style of Dr. Seuss. It then plaigerized the actual Seuss story, almost verbatim, in a clear abuse of copyright law. This is the stuff that Apple is supposedly trailing behind.

So the report here that Apple is developing AI but, unlike their “cutting edge” competitors, not releasing something that produces unreliable garbage, suggests that no, they’re not behind. They’re just repeating the same pattern again of carefully producing something of high quality and reliability, and in a form that is intuitively useful, rather than a gimmicky demonstration that they can do a thing, whether it’s useful or not. Eventually they’ll release something that consistently produces reliable information, and likely does so while respecting copyright and other intellectual property rights. The test will be that not only will it be unlikely to hallucinate in ways that mislead or embarrass its honest users, it will actually disappoint those with more nefarious intent. When asked to produce a report with dubious or false conclusions, it won’t comply like a sociopathic sycophant. It will respond by telling the user that the reliable data not only doesn’t support the requested position, but actually refutes it. Hopefully this will be a feature that Apple uses to market their AI when it’s released.

I've been using a fair collection of Apple Home things for quite a while, and (at least since I eliminated everything Wemo) it all runs pretty reliably and steadily.

That is, except for the couple of times recently when I've tried introducing Matter devices. Then all of a sudden other things start randomly dropping out and getting glitchy. It could be coincidence, but at this point I'm hesitant to play with devices that only work via Matter. Also, I have definitely seen no reason to "upgrade" existing HomeKit devices to the Matter standard. It feels a bit like fixing something that isn't broken.

I imagine there will come a time when avoiding the Matter stuff will become more difficult, and I hope it's more reliable by that point.