Iran claimed today that they have a new homegrown air defense system in use. I saw another report about a new Chinese system deployed in Iran that was used to hit the F35.
Who knows what’s true, but it’s 100% clear that the administration is lying to us and maybe even to themselves. We lost multiple aircraft yesterday. That F15 would likely only be used in situations where we believe we have air superiority. The fact that it was shot down is a big fuck up and suggests the people in charge don’t actually know what they’re up against.
What changed is he took the mask off. He was always the sleaze that he is today, but a lot of us were fooled into believing he wanted to do something good.
He brought good things due to high-conviction bold moves though, like democratizing EVs, reusable rockets, and most of all, actual internet in airplanes.
Is it accurate to say Tesla democratized EVs? The Roadster came out in 2008 but was over $100k. Over its lifetime they only sold around 2500. It was always a rich person's car.
The first 21st century EV in the US that was aimed at a more mainstream mass market was the Nissan Leaf which launched in late 2010, and in the first year sold 4x as many units Tesla Roadster's lifetime sales.
Tesla took a significant step toward an EV for the less rich with the Model S in 2012. It was still a lot more expensive than a Leaf (about 80%ish more for a base Model S) but way less than the Roadster.
The Leaf was the world's best selling EV in 2011-2014 and 2016, and in 2020 was the first to reach 500k sales.
It wasn't until 2017 with the model 3 that Tesla had a car that, like the Leaf, was priced in the range typical middle class families could afford. That's when they took off, and they caught up and passed Leaf in cumulative sales in early 2021.
- he most certainly did not democratize EVs, although he said the plan all along was to make cheap EVs it wasn’t until other car companies started “democratizing” EVs that his had was forced (and delayed)
- we had internet (and still do) in planes that have nothing to do with starlink
I don't agree after reading Walter Isaacson's excellent biography of Elon. It's deeply unfortunate that the book is already a few years old, I'd love and buy the hell out of a 2nd edition that is updated with the last few years.
Obviously it's always been latent in Elon, but he was a pretty bog standard lightly-if-apolitical silicon valley startup guy for most of his adult life. The free speech erosion under the Biden admin is what really started to "red pill" him and eventually led him off the cliff. It's a sad story really, but an important one because I think there are a lot of people in the same boat, and understandign them is important if we want to correct the trajectory of our country's ship. It's a damn hard problem though.
>Having reportedly voted for Joe Biden in 2020, Musk even voiced his pro-Dems alignment in 2022 when he posted on X, formerly Twitter, that he had “strongly supported Obama for President” in 2007.
I think he turned after Tesla was snubbed at Biden's 2021 EV summit because although it was the US's largest EV maker it wasn't unionized and Biden was in with the unions.
There are a lot of people who are unhappy with the steps the government took to crack down on COVID misinformation, and some people are still upset about Twitter's decision to limit spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story (which was entirely unilateral, and reversed within 24 hours).
Both of these took place in 2020, when Trump was president, but of course Trump's greatest coup was to make everybody think Biden was president in 2020.
Though IMHO it's not just a Biden problem, it's a "everybody in power" problem. They just can't seem to resist (ab)using their power to shape the conversation and censor their opponents. It's also not new, it's been happening for hundreds of years at least. But it did get a lot more brazen under Biden IMHO with Twitter/Facebook etc and admin officials telling private companies what to censor (err, "moderate").
This is your regularly mandated PSA that the quote about "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater" comes from Schenck v US, which used that analogy to justify why the government could ban people from protesting the draft in WW1. It is not good law anymore, and has been fully superseded since the Brandenburg v Ohio case which limited the exemption to "imminent lawless action."
Read the links. It wasn't just that. People from the administration were actively talking with social media companies and telling them to take stuff down. At some points they even demanded it.
andy do you really think the Hunter Biden laptop story was equivalent or even close to "yelling fire in a crowded theatre"?
They didn't. Fbi told Facebook etc to be on the lookout for Russia pushing stories to influence elections etc, they didn't ask them to do anything specific. Bidens campaign did ask Twitter to remove nudes of his son, which already broke Twitters own rules. This is why the twitterfiles were a nothing burger.
I think you need to learn more about the history of U.S./Iran relations over the past 75 years. There was a pretty good episode of NPR Throughline a couple weeks back that gets into the CIA bullshit and then 1979 onwards. Iran has not been a good actor, but we aren’t exactly saints either. It’s an ugly situation all around.
Windows 11 performs like a pig, it’s full of unnecessary notifications and apps that constantly seek attention, copilot isn’t useful, I feel like I’m being spied on, the UI is weird.
It could be turned into a great OS if they simply remove some things. Get rid of the ads, make copilot an optional component, stop trying to sell 365, let me turn off telemetry, etc.
Remember when installers allowed you to personalize the components you wanted to install? I miss that. I wasn't on windows but I remember that office allowed you to choose which components you wanted
Many retailers increase their prices by multiples of the tariff increase rather than a straight passthrough so that they can maintain their margins. It's probably why a lot of the biggest retailers with monopolies aren't complaining much about tariffs. They mostly keep the same margin and actually increase revenue. Meanwhile, it's been incredibly damaging to small businesses and consumers. Functionally, tariffs have been a massive wealth transfer.
Can't repeat this enough and I'd like to make sure to connect the dots. The Big Beautiful Bill that was signed into law cut taxes. To keep the US Federal Government from going (even more) into debt, Trump introduced aggressive tariffs (it doesn't matter that he introduced the tariffs before the BBB became law because he/they knew the BBB would pass and that was baked into the tariff decision).
The BBB tax cuts benefit the wealthy much more than the average person. The tariffs are borne by both the wealthy and by the average person when they buy tariffed goods, but those tariffs are easily absorbed by the wealthy while acting as an additional tax on the average person by increasing prices. This is just about as direct a transfer of wealth from the average person to the wealthy as you could possibly put into place (barring an actual transfer where the average person is taxed and those dollars are literally transferred directly into a wealthy person's bank account).
In a way, it's a genius move. Convince a healthy chunk of the US population that you're on a populist crusade to bring jobs back to America while increasing the wealth of the wealthy and taking even more of the average person's income. Don't forget that the reason the jobs were exported in the first place was to decrease costs so that, you guessed it, wealthy people would get wealthier (but at least in that scenario the cost of a tv went way down, am I right???).
All that said, I don't mean to suggest that bringing jobs back isn't actually a goal. It's just not the primary goal. My take on the priorities of the current admin's tax policy, including the tariffs (which, broken record, are taxes) 1. decrease taxes on the wealthy 2. decrease income taxes on everyone else who pays taxes 3. get "everyone else who pays taxes" to fund the decreased taxes on the wealthy 4. bring jobs back. Somewhere in there is also "create a mechanism for opaque profiteering." I'm not quite sure where that falls on the list. Cynically it's probably number 2.
Based on the graph, the increase in cost to the retailer was $0.49 and they marked up $1.10. I imagine this is pretty standard markup but multiplies the effect of the tariff and passes it to the consumer, not to mention the producer and importer.
also, I'm not sure retailers are necessarily to blame. some use pretty simple math in calculating the retail price based on cost and don't necessarily have visibility into the tariffs.
I can share my own experience as a small business owner. I sell coffee. I engage in some direct trade and also buy some coffee from domestic vendors who already have the coffee stateside.
I primarily buy Costa Rican coffee and they got hit with a 10% tariff. That adds like 5 cents to a latte. Whatever. I’m not raising my prices over that. But then Brazil got nailed with much higher tariffs and they are the #1 exporter. Colombia was another one that got hit with high tariffs and they are a major producer. Suddenly, that was driving up the cost of my Costa Rican coffee as demand that was previously met by Brazil and Colombia shifted to other countries. I went from being the exclusive U.S. importer of my coffee to being in a bidding war. The last time I imported coffee, it cost me twice as much as the shipment prior. Then they tried to raise the price again. I ended up having to find new suppliers before things eventually settled down when the people in charge realized you can’t produce coffee in the U.S. (Technically, Hawaii produces exorbitantly priced coffee at a max capacity that amounts to a rounding error relative to domestic demand. There’s no other place in the U.S. with the climate to grow coffee. Besides, it’s incredibly labor intensive. Coffee essentially can’t be produced here.)
Cups were a real pain in the ass too. We were buying our stuff from the Dominican Republic and Latin America, but people are mostly getting that stuff from China. When China became prohibitively expensive, everyone rushed to find other suppliers. That drove prices up and messed up lead times in the short term. The story with most packaging was the same.
Literally every single item required for my business increased in price. It turns out nobody produces anything 100% domestically without any foreign input. My syrups are made in the USA but the bottles they come in are from somewhere else. My empanada shells come from Argentina. Everything from chocolate to pistachios to straws and cleaning supplies. Everything is a product of global trade, whether it’s ingredients, raw materials, packaging, or the machinery and tools used to manufacture it. To maintain my own equipment, I have to buy parts from Italy.
I held out for several months. I was feeling it as a business owner as well as every time I went to the store. I knew my customers were feeling it. I live in the neighborhood where my business is located. A lot of my customers are retirees on a fixed income. The last thing I want to do is add to the pressure. Meanwhile, I have employees who deserve a living wage. I have my own needs. I dumped some products and suppliers that became too expensive for me to sell and have any remaining dignity. I saved everywhere I could without compromising on quality.
About 7 months into this bullshit I had to raise prices for most of my products. It couldn’t be helped. Still, I’m embarrassed at how much we have to charge for some items.
I feel like the last year has been complete chaos. It’s economic shocks and supply chain disruptions everywhere I look. It’s just one thing after another and that’s before I even turn on the news.
And I bet when you did eventually raise your prices, you raised them by more than you strictly needed to. Partly to help offset the losses you took for the 7 months you didn't raise prices, and partly to give yourself enough margin so that if your supplier's prices go up tomorrow (which they will) you don't have to raise your prices immediately.
That's classic "prices are sticky behavior". Prices change less often, and by more, than they would in a classical economics model.
Thankfully Firefox has a mute button on every tab but I also frantically scrolled down the page looking for a video to stop, but it was futile - there is no video!? It's just a podcast, describing phones with keyboards? CNET really has fallen.
It took all of 2 minutes to delete my account and block Discord from my network. Credit to Discord for making the process very easy using the mobile app. I'm not going to put up with this crap just to occasionally use this app to play games with friends. My kids sure as hell aren't going to comply with this policy either.
Some people just want their name in the contributor list, whether it's for ego, to build a portfolio, etc. I think that's what it comes down to. Many projects, especially high profile ones, have to deal with low effort contributions - correcting spelling mistakes, reformatting code, etc. It's been going on for a long time. The Linux contributor guidelines - probably a lot of other projects too - specifically call this stuff out and caution people not to do it lest they suffer the wrath of the LKML. AI coding tools open up all kinds of new possibilities for these types of contributors, but it's not AI that's the problem.
Who knows what’s true, but it’s 100% clear that the administration is lying to us and maybe even to themselves. We lost multiple aircraft yesterday. That F15 would likely only be used in situations where we believe we have air superiority. The fact that it was shot down is a big fuck up and suggests the people in charge don’t actually know what they’re up against.
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