dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
it's like 4% of their endowment
anyway, they could, and maybe they should spend more of their endowment on their own research, but that still doesn't mean "failed dumb ideological shit tests" is a solid reason for government to cancel science funding
dr_analog
razorboy
16d ago
Having to suspend or scrap tons of ongoing research projects is fairly bad for them, and probably also society. I suppose they can float them out of endowments but not permanently.
It would be nice if we were laying off biochem grads for good reasons and not ideological shit test reasons.
My wife wants us to move. I keep arguing that if America goes down the shitter, Europe is probably an even worse place to be even if we can live there indefinitely (we can).
Her argument comes more from a place of virtue ethics, rather than utilitarianism. She feels invested in America and we raise our kids here and reading all of this bad stuff in the news feels bad and makes her want to get America out of our lives. It does not matter if our quality of life would be worse in Europe, at least we can live in a society that is not so sick.
I'm surprised it's legal to physically remove someone from the US without a court hearing right before they get shoved onto a plane to at least confirm identity and that a legal basis exists to deport them.
I would expect the absence of this to make the judiciary pretty mad and for ICE agents to be found in contempt if they keep doing it after admonishment.
I am in the middle of the Culture series and feeling a loss of momentum. I enjoyed Player of Games, Consider Phlebus and to some degree Use of Weapons but it feels pretty underwhelming afterwards.
The State of the Art was a weird mix of short stories that barely kept me going. Had to skip ahead to Matter since the others aren't available in my library.. I'm finding Matter is also rather snoozeville.
Any other good ones? I really like being immersed in the Culture parts of the Culture universe but all of the rest is not that interesting.
Well, what does a good outcome look like to you?
Every way I can think of to measure this universal tariff move looks bad, regardless of how many dimensions of chess I use.
Aside from maybe demonstrating that the coffee shop revolutionary liberals suddenly love capitalism and are hypocrites. That has been amusing but not really worth the cost.
dr_analog
razorboy
18d ago
We'll just start an old-timey war effort to re-purpose old smartphones for military purposes. Win the War with your Brains and Brawn by recycling your old smartphones!
But more seriously, domestic production of smartphones is possible. Purism produces a Made in USA smartphone if you don't mind not having the SOTA. I expect interest in this space to increase from here.
I consider myself using the deliberate tactical choices lens here. Valuate the choices by its effects: it's bad!
Stated another way, I interpret your post as saying: don't judge Trump by the virtues of his choices, judge him by the results. See how he punks the planning boards who don't let shit get built? Great. Now lets apply that standard to his universal tariffs.
When I do that, they still seem like a disaster.
dr_analog
razorboy
18d ago
So... how do you not read total literal societal collapse as an indictment of feminism?
dr_analog
razorboy
19d ago
Doesn't this "Art of the Deal" lens prove too much?
Can you find any economist who thinks universal tariffs are a good idea? Any published literature on it?
Maybe they're deliberate tactical choices, but to what gain? The markets lost something like $10t in value since he announced them. Losses on this scale were certain while any recovery afterwards is more speculative due to the loss of confidence. Is whatever Trump thinks he's going to gain from this worth that risk?
Almost certainly no. Just because you may be doing this as a tactical choice doesn't shield you from your choice mathing out to erratic and retarded.
dr_analog
razorboy
19d ago
If we can make a phone, we can make AI killbots. If we can't make a phone, we can't make killbots. The Chinese can make both. They will win the next war if they have killbots and we don't, and it won't even be close.
I like the vibe but I think you're imagining different kinds of killbots than I am? Aside from microprocessors I believe phones and killbots have very different tech trees?
Some estimates suggested iPhone prices and other electronic goods in the US would have gone up three times if the costs of the tariffs had been passed on to consumers.
Estimates by who? This doesn't math out even if you do the naive thing and assume 125% tariff is on the retail price. A $1000 iPhone would cost $2250 then.
But aren't tariffs on the manufactured cost and not the retail price? Isn't the cost of an iPhone something like $300? A 125% tariff on that adds $375 to the price, not $1250.
dr_analog
razorboy
20d ago
As if the natives prefer to live in teepees and hunt bison rather than living in houses with flush toilets and eating microwaved lean pockets like the rest of us.
Agreed, that would also be a bad precedent.
So where do we stand? If the POTUS disappears even a US citizen to a foreign prison we just have to trust their best effort, which may be no actual effort, to bring them back? Any consequences for the POTUS here would be judicial overreach?
The US has accidentally deported citizens before. Apparently, they've been so embarrassed they tried hard to fix it on their own, with no court order needed. That's just because the executives have thought this an important norm to uphold?
dr_analog
razorboy
20d ago
Is it? Had the government accidentally deported a US citizen to an El Salvadorsn prison I don't see why they can't make the same exact argument: the courts cannot dictate to the executive how to retrieve them, it's completely up to the executive to do it or just kind of half heartedly try or just blow the whole thing off because they're too busy.
This is a pretty disturbing precedent to set if it stands.
Source
napkin math. let me see why I'm so off from the GAO report
UPDATE: I don't quite understand the takeaway from Figure 11. How does interest on the debt growing to 27% of federal "spending" mean we would find the revenue to keep paying it? Isn't it more clear to say that our liabilities would grow such that 27% of them are interest payments alone?
In 2025, we already currently deficit spend $2t to meet our $8t a year in obligations.
What figure 3 of that report makes clear is that the size of our interest payments will grow out of proportion with revenue growth. That's the scary part IMO. It's already happening and I think even higher GDP growth + the other politically impossible things I mentioned in my OP wouldn't help us catch up with it.
So, how doomed should I be about the national debt situation in the US?
It seems pretty hopeless. Even if we have excellent growth (>2%), and do something politically impossible like increase taxes by 2% and cut spending by 2%, we will still probably become unable to service the interest on the debt by 2032 or something. Do I have that right?
Anyplace safe? Seems like Europe just does as badly if not worse than the US if the US defaults.
Maybe it won't be so bad? #cope #cope #cope
dr_analog
razorboy
21d ago
Yes, before, if China approached your country and said you must take your pick: the US or China, you would probably pick the US.
After all of this unhinged clown shit, if the US says you must choose between the US and China, it's a tough call!
I would add to this that uninformed order flow retail traders had much less access to derivatives in the past, whereas now, apps like Robinhood make them a breeze to enable and eagerly teach you how to use them.
Futures are therefore more broadly discussed.
dr_analog
razorboy
23d ago
there is no easy way for say, Australia to force their businesses to start buying more American made products.
If I was sufficiently motivated to encourage buying from America, I would reduce tariffs on imports to 0 and maybe do whatever it is to my currency that makes it cheap to buy US goods.
I would also look at whoever we get a bunch of non-American stuff from and increase tariffs on them.
dr_analog
razorboy
24d ago
Yeah mine wasn't ideal, I had to go down stairs and around some corners.
If I had to do it again I would've just drilled through some walls. Was my landlord going to like it? No. Would they have been able to stop me? Also no.
dr_analog
razorboy
25d ago
The in-built wifi on my MSI Pro B650 motherboard sucks donkey dick. My phones and laptop pick up great signal in my bedroom, this thing barely wanted to connect. Fortunately, the router is some kind of 5g contraption, and I just moved it closer and kept the living room door proper open. I went from no stable connection to several hundred mbps down, which is good enough. Problem solved for now.
You may want to consider one of those wall modules that have ethernet ports on them that you can plug into an electrical outlet, and uses the mains as a bridge. That's what I would do to get at a router far away from my desktop PC in a rental apartment.
The Nvidia H20 exports ban is back on?
Lets recap. DeepSeek stuns the world by dropping a model almost as good as SOTA models while flexing incredible performance gains through cunning Chinese hacking. It's revealed they used lower end H20 GPUs vs the more decadent A100 / H100 / B100 class chips that fat American programmers use. Thusly, the US moves to ban exports of H20s as well.
Except last week, on April 9th, following the news of Jensen Huang dropping a million bucks at a Mar-a-Lago dinner with Trump, the ban is apparently lifted, stunning all China hawks in the country (and AI safetyists) and demonstrating that Trump will sell out his country to fucking China for a $1 million donation.
But today, Nvidia announces the export ban is on. And ... apparently was never lifted? The market reacts and knocks them down a few points.
What... happened? Checking back, it seems the only source for the news that the H20 ban was lifted was "two unnamed sources" reported by NPR.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/nx-s1-5356480/nvidia-china-ai-h20-chips-trump
Weirdly, neither the USG nor Nvidia commented on it.
Can we read into the fact that since neither party commented on it, lifting the H20 ban was actually on the table? Was this leaked by one side to put pressure on the other? Was it a trial balloon? Or do we even trust that NPR actually reached out for comment like they said they did?
More options
Context Copy link