blastdoor

ilarynx said:

This article helps to explain the small pockets of minions supporting the chaotic tariffs:

The strange link between Trump’s tariffs and incel ideology

Meet the lonely men who think the tariffs will get them girlfriends.

https://apple.news/AjEvNnQFnTpKbDNMkKkowsA

Interesting read. HRC's "basket of deplorables" comment continues to accurately describe Trump's base. 

mpantone said:

The rare earth mining element issue isn't China's only card in this trade war. They also hold about $770 billion in US Treasury bonds. That's a more dire concern for the US government. If China (or other countries) decide to dump Treasuries, there's a very real risk of serious economic downturn.

Normally I'd say that their treasury holdings are no big deal, and that if they dumped their bonds they'd mostly end up hurting themselves. But these are not normal times. Trump's blatant incompetence across multiple domains raises serious concerns about the credibility of the United States government and the safety of all US assets. If China were to dump bonds now, it's not clear that there would be a ton of buyers waiting to scoop them up (as would normally be the case). 

If China wanted to force a financial crisis to send the US into a depression and utterly break Trump and the Republican Party in general, this year might be the time to do it. Maybe wait until the debt ceiling is up for a vote and tensions are running high anyway. 

Trump truly is the "enemy within." He has done more damage to the United States than all other KGB assets combined. 

I’ve been moving to the camp of people saying Cook needs to go due to the AI situation, but maybe in this context it’s more important to have a CEO adept at getting what his company needs from the dictator than it is to have a CEO who knows how to make great products.

Note, that while the CSAM detection feature has several parallels to the new Apple Intelligence training system, they are built on different technologies. The noise introduced to the data sets to obfuscate user data, which is what makes it Differential Privacy, was not part of the CSAM detection feature, for example.

anonymouse said:

Can AI please stop using the word 'reciprocal' in describing these tariffs, or at least put it in scare quotes? There's nothing reciprocal about Trump's "reciprocal" tariffs, it's just another instance of Orwellian language perversion.

In this case I agree. But I concede it’s a bit tricky for publications to deal with this sort of thing. Take the Inflation Reduction Act as an example. That is the name of the act, and there are things in it that might eventually reduce inflation (maybe), but there was no way it was going to reduce the inflation that existed at the time of its passing. So how should publications handle something like that? Maybe prefacing with “so-called” or using scare quotes is the best feasible option, but it is tough to be consistent with it