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I really don't like making grand pronouncements (I think it's a bit narcissistic) but since I seem to have a reputation on The Motte I think it's only fair to take my licks:
Blah blah blah, words words words, excuses excuses, feel free to get your licks in now.
It’s not a victory because as I and everyone else here told told you over and over again the war wasn’t actually over and when the Democrats blow out the Midterms, Trump will have to cut an embarrassing and humiliating deal. The Iranian regime is still around and the US accomplished almost none of their stated war aims (only sank their blue water navy). The best case scenario is now the pre-war consensus. Nobody will ever be dumb enough again to try to topple this regime, so it completely backfired. They will almost assuredly keep their nuclear material. It was a national humiliation.
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Is it still a military success if Congress defunds the war Vietnam style?
If Republicans had received a "narrowly lose Iowa and Texas" sort of repudiation they might have closed ranks and held Trump's veto but losing Mississippi is enough of a buttblasting to put the fear of God into the hearts of Senators who haven't faced a competitive election in their lives. Even Ted Cruz is calling for an end to the war at this point.
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I really don't agree with you on most things, but I found myself nodding in agreement with basically all of this. Great post, strong takes, they'll age well.
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I'm not necessarily sure this is a bad thing: the buildout plans were so large that I didn't really think they were practical anyway. Were we really going to grow grid capacity by 300% in under a decade? I buy that it'll be game changing in lots of ways, but is the demand really there to pay for infinite tokens? The models have gotten both better and more efficient recently, too: do we need as much compute as we thought?
Slowing over-eager investment in boom-bust cycles could be stabilizing, even.
I think that we will eventually swallow all that capacity and more. Superintelligence can be used to solve, by definition, almost any problem, and there are functionally infinite problems. How to drive cars, how to design a new rocket ship part, how to identify defective potatoes on the factory line, how to build robots to paint your house, how to build more efficient chips to power the robots, how to build factories to build the chips. ChatGPT, process these dexa scans and blood work and design a diet for me to lose twenty pounds by summer. Make it more suitable for an Asian palate. Automate a weekly grocery list on a $120 budget and ship everything to my address. Find a cheap vacation rental near the beach in August. Scan this satellite imagery of Nunavik for likely undiscovered oil reserves. Design a 3D print of an art deco cornice to be glued above my mantle. Scan this image to match this color of paint. Spitball ideas for how to process and sell 3,000 pounds of spinach before it rots. Design the marketing. Anything.
That this hasn't happened yet is because 1) the AI isn't quite good enough yet 2) most people do not understand the scale of change or even what's possible.
At the same time I'm not meaningfully worried by a pause. A pause can basically be marketing. A pause might even lead to a buildout, if voters are assuaged that datacenters have been defeated forever so now we're going to give "compute campuses" a try.
Please, please, please, for the love of Ahura Mazda, stop this.
I know, it's petty, and of all the things Trump has done that I dislike, declaring that AI should be called "Superintelligence" shouldn't be at the top of my list, but it is absurdity of the highest order to issue an Executive Order based on a shower thought. "Superintelligence" actually has a meaning in the AI field, and other than trolling people I can't even see what Trump's point was in doing this. Is it supposed to "own the libs" who hate data centers? Why the heck would you immediately switch to the new term like a Party member just notified of the latest un-words?
I agreed with most of the points in your top-level and thought it was a good and thoughtful post, for whatever that is worth.
I think "deadnaming" (neologism), or not using the "prefered pronouns" (again, recently invented set phrase) was at one point declared to be against the rules of this community. As at least one not totally irrelevent AI company refers to the technology as SI, SI is at least for that company an endonym.
Is that sufficient for the technology as a whole to at least include SI in its name, if not for SI to displace it wholly?
I propose a compromise: SAI. This avoids the collision with ASI, as SI might be viewed its shortening, and also respect the self-identification of all.
Realistically you can call it whatever you want.
From a technical standpoint it is the field of Artificial Intelligence(AI) The fields goal is to reach Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and eventually Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI).
You may call it SI or SAI all you want but the only thing you are communicating is that you don’t understand the boundary of word semantics as it relates to technical function. If you wish to convey lack of competency in favor of political tribal signaling that is your prerogative but don’t expect anyone else to join you who isn’t already in the communist party.
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Sure, but the fact that we "eventually swallowed all that capacity" in network infrastructure doesn't mean Cisco was a good investment in 2000.
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If a human office worker earns $70k per year, and companies are willing to pay for this, then an AI which can fully replace their job (with equal quality) is worth up to $70k in tokens to that company. An AI which can half-replace their job (reducing the need for employees of that type by half) is worth up to $35k per year in tokens.
The U.S. electric production and distribution is about 2% GDP. If AI can replace 6% of the economy then that would be worth a 3x grid capacity increase. Now, the actual tradeoff ratio would be less because the whole point is that you replace people using AI that cost less, not equal amounts. And I'm not sure that it would be practical/feasible to physically increase the grid that much that quickly. But I don't think it's an issue of lack of demand.
Surely, there is value in being independent of foreign software and the ability of human workers to learn and adapt. So the "up to" is probably doing a lot of work here. It probably varies a lot from place to place (what would it take for a hospital to feed patient data to Anthropic?), but I could easily imagine employers only being willing to replace their workers with agents if the savings are substantial.
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I think people liked the MAGA parts of Trump’s agenda, but disliked the neocon parts. So “back to the old Republican party” is exactly the wrong takeaway.
Unfortunately I also agree that the unpopularity of the war in iran is basically bullshit, and it was plainly the right thing to do. A full scale invasion would have been a terrible idea but neutering Iran is a positive. I hope we don’t let them off the hook.
Fuentes preached that if you wanted to stop the Israel lobby you had to be willing to hold a gun to the GOP’s head over the issue, even if it meant giving control to the Democrats. Clearly he meant it. I think this is idiotic. Complaining about money or military aid for Israel is one thing, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to everything else.
I don't know what Fuentes truly believes, but if I try to reconstruct his theory by reading into his public statements it would be something like this:
The problem is not the money or military aid to Israel, it's the split loyalties, lack of focus, and bad optics caused by Israel-sympathizers in the American right. This problem is not just theoretical, since it is evident that Trump himself, the leader of MAGA, is a huge Israel-supporter. It is impossible to build a successful right-wing populist movement in the US as long as every time it wins power, it immediately disappoints its supporters by using that power to help Israel while neglecting American issues. Even just the appearance that it does this, even if the appearance is inaccurate, is devastating. We see this manifest itself in the midterm election. It is better to have a unified and potent smaller movement than to have a broader movement that does not accomplish the goals. Focused vanguardism is more likely to deliver results than unfocused split-loyalties Trumpist MAGAism that spends its efforts on Israel and ballrooms.
Yeah, but he also clearly just has a personal grudge. This was clear from his Tucker interview that he was extremely upset by the attempted deplatforming by the Israel lobby, and rather than acquiesce he made it his #1 issue out of spite.
He’s funny, he has good takes on some things, but his view that Israel is the most important issue and it’s worth burning it all down to beat the Israel lobby is, in my opinion, deranged and driven by personal grievance more than the logic you describe.
He actually does need to he made irrelevant, not because he’s anti-Semitic, but because he goes out of his way to make Republicans lose, and is very effective at it. And not even over an issue that is actually worthwhile.
I mean, if the issue isn't worthwhile then maybe Republicans should dump Israel
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Obviously this is not the opinion of the electorate. Consider, also, there are probably a dozen single issue issues that have piled up against Trump, creating a new issue - the war, inflation, gas, Ukraine, Israel, corruption, Doge, Musk, immigration, abortion, the ballroom, rhetoric/decorum, … This election was well earned.
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Texas still has a conservative (well, technical split) legislature, so that’s a small glimmer of hope.
Texas Dems flipped the state house.
Yes but Republicans kept the senate. They can still block a lot of bullshit. (And a lot of the “democrats” are conservative on certain things, im pretty sure some of them helped get the abortion ban passed)
Sure, but if you're a local business, you sometimes need things from the state government in a way that you don't from Washington. You need a relationship with your local state rep and your governor/AG/commissioner of such and so, you need a functioning state government to pass laws and do things for you.
Texas business interests can't just sit out the next however many years and wait for Republicans to come back. They're going to have to form relationships with Democrats.
I'm curious how valuable those are in Texas, given that its legislature meets only 6 months every two years (plus whenever the governor calls a special session). Could go either way.
The things businesses need from state legislators aren't necessarily things relating to legislation. Whenever you're dealing with red tape and need a department to take action on something, even if that action is uncontroversial, pressure from a legislator can be the difference between a permit application sitting on a bureaucrat's desk for six months to moving to the top of the to-do pile. I know from government employees that they will respond fairly quickly once a politician gets up their ass about something. A personal example, not state but Federal, is that a nonprofit I sit on the board of recently had its 501(c)(3) status revoked due to not filing annual disclosures. We had filed the disclosures, and the IRS hadn't sent a letter of revocation (we found out when someone tried to donate and it got flagged by Schwab). Trying to resolve the matter through the IRS Exempt Organizations hotline got us nowhere; when we submitted the proof that we had filed, we were supposed to get a decision in 30 days. After the 30 days was up, we got a letter requesting an additional 60 days. After that 60 days was up, we got a letter requesting another 60 days. All the while some serious grant money was being held up because of this, and my personal contacts at the IRS office in Pittsburgh were unable to do anything. After contacting the local rep's office we got in touch with their IRS liason, who was able to resolve the matter within a week. Going back to the state level, we now had to apply to solicit funds within the state, which is a much more complicated process than the IRS disclosure. At that point, with the clock ticking, we reached out to the state senator's office to ensure that the application would be reviewed quickly, and we were able to get our grant money. To be clear, the board of this organization is left-wing, but we operate in a heavily Republican area, and all our legislative contacts are Republicans who support our mission.
To contrast this, one of the board members has a second home in Colorado, which was for a time in Boebert's district. He was telling me about how some local water authority needs to meet with the rep once a year to get certain basic things. Boebert insisted on a conference call instead of the meeting, and it was clear after the first one that she was bored, not paying attention, and didn't understand what they needed. What was normally a straightforward process turned into a nightmare of dealing with various state and Federal agencies because Boebert was too lazy or stupid to make the requisite phone calls. I posted elsewhere about Camera Bartolotta, and, though I don't live in her district anymore, she's one of the few Republicans I've consistently supported because she's dedicated to basic constituent services. One of the things that concerns me about upstart politicians who are more focused on ideology than public service is that they're good at having a public profile but bad at doing basic things to help people.
I find constituent services quite bizarre. Why should it take talking to an elected legislator who has zero de jure power over the executive, to get shitty bureaucrats to simply do their jobs. It seems like it's just building a parallel government inside of legislator offices and it would be much better if people just did their jobs.
I know this is true though, I have some experience with asking senators or reps for help with immigration forms. It seems it's a mostly nonpartisan thing, since it seems to act as a parallel bureaucracy and doesn't involve much greasing of palms. I actually wonder how much of this is truly done out of individual legislator offices versus just some pooled resource that legislators forward all this mail to.
I'm sure that if you run a very partisan coded organization though you might just get ghosted by the legislator though.
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I'm glad Boebert lost, she was the last of the "MAGA Barbies" and they hurt the Republican brand in countless ways.
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I've heard it's quite a valuable relationship at the federal level, but I was wondering if that still holds for a less-active legislature like the Texas system. Do Texas legislators make those calls when they're not in session, and do the civil servants feel responsible to pick up?
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I remember Abbot called a bunch of special sessions in the past few years and the legislature did fuck all during them. Maybe they didn't want to be bothered to do their jobs.
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Alot can change in 2 years but there's not much that businesses will want from the government that the democrats are willing to give, and that the republicans haven't already given.
Everybody always wants votes and funding in the next election. People remember favors like this and it builds goodwill. If only government workers would do the job they were hired to do, no one would need to go through this stupid process. It was an important part of Susan Collins's electoral longevity.
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See my above comment. It's not about legislation, but constituent services.
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There's a real air of unforced error that hangs about Trump. While the voters wanted to punish those previous presidents for failing to live up to their promises, I think they recognized on some level that those presidents were battling forces largely out of their control and trying their best.
With Trump, there's the sense that he kicked several hornet nests for absolutely no reason and he was the direct instigator of their current problems.
Plus while previous presidents may have made a few quiet deals here and there to set themselves up for a comfortable retirement, Trump and his family took things to completely unprecedented levels. Seriously the $100,000 subscription fee to view "Truths" faster? How is that even legal?
Hasn't trump always been pretty openly corrupt as a President (going back to 2016)? Or have things meaningfully gotten more brazen over the past year or two?
I also wonder whether the fact that the point of comparison is no longer Hillary Clinton also puts his sleaziness in starker contrast.
The Trump shitcoin and the Qatari plane are new, and the two examples I've heard cited most.
The drug trafficker pardons were also supposedly linked to some payout, I think? Haven't really paid that much attention though.
The Qatar plane is such a nothingburger I'm almost surprised the fake news managed to screech about it for so long. It's just a token gift and Trump won't even profit from it personally at all, as it was given to the government. A used up 747 is worth almost nothing to a state level actor, even a 2-bit middle eastern dictatorship.
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This is an area where number lawyering distorts what's rather straight forward observationally. Cost of living is bad, and constantly getting worse. That it was getting worse at a faster rate eariler, when it wasn't as bad on absolute terms, isn't really a headscratcher.
You're comparing rate of inflation, but sentiment is accounted for by looking at cumulative effect. Inflation is a rate of change number. Inflation was bad under Biden, it ate away a lot of slack in the system; now under Trump inflation is still too high even if it's eating cost of living at a lower rate of increase.
Now this is a different conversation than laying blame, but it helps udnerstand why comparing raw inflation rate is not as straightforward when translating it into felt effects.
Imagine you're speeding toward a cliff and accelerating. Now we swap drivers, and not only does that driver maintain the speed, but he continues accelerating! only not accelerating as quickly as driver 1.
Does it really make sense to be confused that the second driver is met with more panic than the first?
Seems like an 8% jump is more noticeable as opposed to a few points years later.
yeah and Biden lost, and Trump won handily. I certainly felt that jump.
But my point is that the cost of living hasn't improved in the intervening years, so the additive inflation has continued to pile on the existing pain.
You all can keep scratching your heads, but it's not that crazy,
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Inflation only goes one way. We're not getting deflation without a recession.
I hope there aren't too many people under the delusion that 2019 prices can come back
uhhh... yes. I was going to add an aside but deleted it because I guess I wrongly assumed it was understood in the frame. That was implicit in the 'cumulative effects' point.
I had a point about building a bridge over the cliff faster than the car was accelerating, but deleted it because it didn't add to the illustration.
Deflation is irrelevant to my point about why a blank 8% was more than 6% doesn't tell the story about cost of living pain.
We came of a decade of very low inflation and a rapidly expanding economy. Then in the first part of this decade, we felt that expansion slow down combined with extremely high inflation. This ate up a lot of the slack in the system. Now under Trump 2, inflation is still too high, and the increase in earnings isn't being felt by the people. So depsite it being less 'too hihg' than under Biden, it can still hurt more. None of this requires expectations of deflation to explain why comparing Biden's highest high to trumps high doesn't tell the story or produce a conundrum
Inflation is 3ish% in 2026 compared to around 2 for the last decade before. It's not great but it's a far cry from the earlier highs. It's not even close.
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In 2020 the frog got told to stay home from his job at the frog soup factory, and after he came back he suddenly freaked out about how hot the water is.
Now the factory is not going to stop making frog soup, but it's gonna take either a while or a big world event to convince the frog that the water's just fine.
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Good on you, brother. I broadly agree with a lot of your points here.
Accepting that you aren't crazy and that it was the right thing to do and is a military success, how do you feel about the procedural aspects of how the war was started? The war effort lacked a congressional declaration or any kind of approval, but even writing that off because we don't declare anything anymore, it lacked a significant public effort to sell the war to the public in advance. Maybe I'm an optimist about the voting public's sophistication, but I think that some of the disapproval of the war stems from the failure to seek even a fig leaf of any kind of democratic legitimacy and approval. Which raises my question to you, as an intelligent pro-war interlocutor: if a successful morally correct war is launched in a way that is illegitimate, what is the correct punishment to inflict on those who started it? If it's "Nothing, it worked out" then the idea of democratic legitimacy is a dead letter and the president has plenary power to declare war, that seems untenable.
I don't think people think through those procedural questions, but I do think the way the war was started and executed ("We won!" "we're about to make a deal" "We're about to end Iranian civilization forever") left a lot of people confused and maybe a little miffed, and dragged down the approval rating. You appear to be correct at this point that the strait of Hormuz is mostly useable for commercial traffic, with a mildly increased risk tolerance. But the repeated announcements have ruined presidential credibility.
A good guide here is the trajectory of GWOT-PATRIOT Act-Neocon consensus between 2006-2008. Everyone said that the voters rejected Dubya and the wars, but Obama kept most of it in place, and it became part of core American governance. Elections have consequences. A lot of MAGA is going to absorbed into the core American synthesis, for both parties. MAGA might die, the same way "Hipsters" aren't around anymore. But MAGA stuff is everywhere, like how I can go to a local microbrewery on my way home and pick up beer.
Voters feel betrayed. I don't know that there is any procedural difference that would have mattered. I don't know that a different explanation would have solved what is perhaps an emotional problem. Perhaps more salesmanship on the war would have been more offensive, felt like an even bigger betrayal.
I think there is something deeper afoot than a communications problem.
It is my observation that leaders in a Democracy have a ten-year lifespan. I mean this in the sense that your dog lives a dozen years, a man has a natural lifespan of something like eighty years. A natural lifespan can be extended but it's more often a ceiling. Most leaders don't even last ten years. Those who do are epoch-defining. Thatcher was kicked out after ten years by her own party, not even for good reasons, almost like an impulse. French presidents get two terms of five years in a system designed to make the presidency akin to a monarchy. Merkel lasted longer than ten, and her tenure defined an entire era of European politics. Trump, likewise, enters this pantheon by virtue of Biden's term, and yet having been a leader for the Republicans the entire time. Ten years or thereabouts seems to me like something of a rule and not a coincidence and I think it merits explaining.
(It's different in monarchical and dictatorial systems but I think a similar constraint is at play. Generally ministers change over more frequently than every ten years. Bismarck, who lasted as Chancellor for about twenty years, formed a cabinet that basically totally changed over ten years in. The Chinese were operating on ten-year leadership cycles until Xi Jinping. Putin has had to shuffle around his government quite a few times now. And frequently those systems that don't make this kind of shuffle blow up in revolution, or completely stagnate.)
My theory is that ten years is roughly the amount of time it takes for people to totally change into a new phase of life. Kids become teenagers, teenagers become adults, adults reach middle-age, then age. Individuals pass through markers at different times but within a population changes averages out to about ten years.
One of the key markers of Trump's success has been his total dominance of media. He essentially invented twitter for politics. His mastery of the rally as a genre gave him a direct connection to his base, which always gave him better instincts than even his smartest advisers. He fundamentally re-ordered the news cycle as such, entire media ecosystems emerged downstream of the changes he wrought in how people consume news.
It's been ten years now since Trump worked through the system and people do consume news differently now. The Democrats are not the same shrill resistance libs they used to be. Trump's rally base isn't a wire directly to the American psyche anymore, the people who still go are a particular kind of people. Media patterns are different. This is why I'm hesitant to say Trump just needed to sell the war better: Trump did give speeches justifying the war, nobody watched them. I don't think it's simple Trump fatigue either (although that's what everybody will say). I think it's more a fundamental shift in how people live, which implies a fundamental shift in how they think of Trump, which, honestly, at this point, is not much at all.
Yes, this is essentially my thesis. This is what happened with, e.g., pardon the grandiosity, Napoleon and Alexander. I suspect that part of MAGA is going to be absorbed into the system and assimilated in ways that would be even surprising to MAGA itself, let alone Democrats. There is another part of MAGA that will refuse to assimilate and possibly fuse with the Groypers, or be scapegoated for Trump's sins, or whatever. I use the comparison to Napoleon especially because it's possible that this all goes "South" and Trump and MAGA suffer bigger losses than anyone can even imagine right now. At what point would you have abandoned Napoleon? And yet, essentially, Napoleon won in a much bigger sense because the political order that defeated him had to accommodate itself to him after all. This is one extremely plausible theory for what happens next (although not the only one -- Republicans could just win in 2028 and then we go back to the seesaw).
The point isn't that if he had done more to "sell" the war than people would have been sold on it or wouldn't have blamed him so much for its effects. The point is that if he had sought congressional approval it would have been clear how unpopular the idea was and he wouldn't have pursued it.
Trump was told that it would be unpopular and he did it anyways. He is saying that he stopped Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and that he would do it all over again.
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Yeah, personally when I hear people say he should have tried to sell the war to the American people, I'm just reminded that GWB burned that card with Iraq.
People forgave the Venezuela raid because it was over quickly, so if it had to be done Trump's best bet was to make Iran topple quickly, and once that failed the best alternative was to make it barely a war by turning it into a blocade, but it's the awkward period in between before they settled on the blocade that made him and his supporters who were confident they had voted for the "no foreign wars" candidate look foolish.
I assume the plan was to repeat the Venezuela gambit: a sudden decapitation strike, then a negotiated agreement with the remaining leadership for political realignment. When that failed, they iterated it a few times on new leadership and infrastructure threats, before pivoting to the blockade.
If it'd have worked, I think we'd be talking about it very differently. But it didn't, presumably because at least many of the Iranian political caste are earnest in their philosophy regardless of risk to life.
I really think the issue is the middle iterative part, it left time for it to cement as "a war" in most people's minds. If they had gone straight from initial strikes, to the blockade, then there would have been little impression that this was a war.
It's like if I jumped on someone, punched them and then started choking them out, am in "a fight" or beating someone up? If in between the first punch and the choking I wrestle and exchange blows with the other, then yeah, I'm in a fight.
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What I hope is that this doesn't cool down the window of opportunity in Europe for change. It might give right-wing people outside the US, even if they don't particularly care about Trump or US Republicans, the impression that the arc of history is no longer bending towards their side and cool some off. On the other hand, I don't see this stopping the immigration related debacles there, US Democrats winning the senate is not going to stop France's "diverse youth" from burning irreplacable historical buildings as a diversion to loot sneaker stores, or Morrocans youth from storming Spanish beaches.
Europe has a lot of problems that go beyond immigration. Look at the mounting French debt crisis. They do not have the money to continue to live in the manner in which they have become accustomed. Macron has been unable to do much of anything about it. The French do not seem to want to do anything about it. Le Pen wants to address it with a modest savings package that can not go far enough. Melechon wants to default (lol).
My experience dealing with Europeans is that they are unwilling to make the hard choices necessary to sustain their sovereignty. They are very confused when America does, and in fact use America as an example of what not to do. This has burned them on Russia, gas prices, Chinese imports, tech, SpaceX, etc. etc.
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