I have a feeling he's more interested in getting sweet deals for Oracle. Essentially they buy WB and make Trump happy; htey still own an asset that is worth something useful; all the IP and all the stations, so it's not like he's losing anything. And in return Oracle is currently bidding on JWCC. So he helps out Trump, and in return Oracle gets to be the backbone of the US military's cloud computing efforts for an extremely long time. JWCC is still out for bid between MS, Amazon, and Google.

My family is an anecdote that would agree with your assessment. We do quite well for ourselves, but balk at $50 for even a relatively fast meal to go out and stay in and cook. While we're pretty diligent about where we shop, our grocery bill is around $1200 per month for 3 mouths. $1200 month, 30 days, 3 meals a day, where each is home cooked with veggies and protein of all types (I do steaks, roasts, fish, chicken of a variety of styles), that equates to around $4.50/meal. The absolute cheapest i can find a take-out meal at a fast food restaurant will put you back $9 to $10 each for a far unhealthier meal.

So we at least are an example of what you're talking about.

The problem with what you're suggesting is that it assumes that people make logical choices. That people will make the best decisions based on the most information. It simply isn't true. It's what we discuss in economics, that informed buyers make rational choices to determine the best set price and value, but that's economics models not the real world.

Most people do not want to make informed choices. They just want their burger and they'll pay a tip because it's the custom. Will people buy more because they know a restaurant is paying a living wage and so they'll pay 20% or 30% more for the burger because it's better for society? No, they do not.

I'm not supporting it, it's just how it is, but to assume that it will change for the better because better informed customers will make better decisions doesn't hold true in reality. But I do disagree with you about "tricking" your customers. How are they tricking you? You know if you're going out you're going to pay the tip. that's literally every restaurant in the entire United States. If you don't assume you're paying the menu price plus sales tax plus 18-20% in tip then you have a problem. The fundamental difference though is to the buyer (the restaurant patron), you assume you're going to pay an extra 20%, but it feels discretionary. If it's roped into the price, it feels mandatory, and people reject the mandatory cost, but htey feel empowered when it's discretionary, even if by custom you're going to pay it.

There is a theory that tipping culture comes from Jim Crow/Reconstruction era laws to avoid paying newly freed slaves a reasonable wage, and it just became institutionalized. I don't fully support this theory; I think tipping has a lot of complex origins, but it is interesting particularly when you refer to it as a "tipping disease".

That feels good to say, but doesn't actually work in reality. If you turn to paying full wages, then the business has to pass on the cost of that wage in their meal prices. However restaurant meals compared to other types of products are "one of the highest elastic prices out there at 2.27. That means for a 10% increase in price, you have a subsequent 22.7% decrease in sales. Given most restaurants operate on very thin margins, many people simply wouldn't go out. While one could imagine that the overall net cost is the same if the tip is just factored into the price, studies show that segregated or discretionary costs, even if they are required due to cultural norms, have less of an impact on price elasticity; this is why for example the airlines offer 4 prices for the same seat, including a budget option where you can pay an extra fee to check an extra bag.

So I think what you'd find is that a lot of restaurants would go out of business, and a lot fewer would start, because it wouldn't be economical to run a restaurant anymore, and thus there'd be a lot fewer employed waiters and waitresses.

Hi ChatGPT, we're starting to fall off course. Can you redirect our thrusters so we don't fall back into the atmosphere and burn up?

ChatGPT: That's a great idea. I will align all 6 thrusters and calculate a trajectory to use optimal fuel burn and get us to LEO.

But ChatGPT, we only have 4 thrusters.

ChatGPT: you're right, my mistake. It seems I hallucinated how many thusters were on board. Unfortunately my calculations are off, and you are now going to die a horrible fiery death.

Would you like to notify your next of kin that your ashes have been spread across the Pacific Ocean?

I read it as not being about funding, it's about what to work on first. If you focus on an application sure that enhances revenue projections, but you might fall behind someone else who sprints ahead with research. They have the money to do both as you say, it's a question of prioritization.

But let's talk about the elephant in the room here, that's not talked about in the article: Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg went all in on metaverse to mediocre results, and now jumped on the LLM/AI bandwagon after people had already gotten going. So he spent ungodly amounts of money to just bring people in without any real way to align them with a vision or core focus or strategy; he just threw shares and money around like it was candy to recruit apparent top talent and just threw them all in a bucket to make it work. That's real Gavin Belson style leadership there. The fact that he hasn't' taken the time to organize the teams and leadership around a vision makes it look like he, and by extension Meta, is flailing.

And what is Meta doing in AI? I know OpenAI/ChatGPT, I know Microsoft/Copilot, I know Anthropic/Claude, Devon, etc. What is Meta's offering? It seems they are light years behind, totally disorganized, and no clear idea of what their angle will be.

All of what you say is true, but the short term is the point I think. I think they need to keep their stock price up given how much they're spending on AI that has no clear path to profitability and is tricky to measure if it's all worth it. If their profits look like garbage because of these investments, it could bring their stock price down quite a bit, creating a cycle that's difficult to escape from.

I think you're missing the point. This isn't about inflated revenue projections. It's about inflated profits.

Each of these companies is spending tremendous amounts on building servers and data centers right now. the cost of that CapEx is depreciated by it's useful service life, which can vary quite a bit depending on what it is. Servers are typically 3 years or so, whereas real estate can be up to 28 or 30 years. It's a non-cash expense, but they get to claim that as an expense and amortize it out for many years, which while a non-cash expense it does allow them to reduce their profits and thus tax basis.

The problem is it reduces profits, which makes the companies seem like they're spending too much money. As a calculated value, it's open to manipulation to make the company look better. It doesn't really matter what number of years you use for a given piece of equipment, as long as it's consistent and it makes sense. Changing your amortization schedule from what it was historically sends a signal that the company is artificially adjusting it's numbers to make things look better.

Using the numbers above, if Meta had the same pre-tax profit of $60B now but was using the 3 year depreciation schedule they used in 2020 vs the current 5.5 year, then instead of depreciation being $13B it'd be $23.8B, meanding they'd lose nearly almost $11B in recorded profits, just from a calculation. So in essence this boosts their stock price by making them look more profitable than they are.

During COVID, a company called Catalent was a key player in the manufacturing of vaccines. They were a public company and hteir stock price went through the roof, despite the fact that historically their sales and stock price grew around 5-8% a year; during COVID it surged 50%. Management of course thought they were brilliant, and also their capacity got drained, so they jacked up prices on everyone else while rapidly expanding.

When COVID subsided, their stock crashed 70%, as not only did they lose the COVID bump but they burned a lot of their customers too; they were saddled with debt and overcapacity, etc. They were bought by Novo Nordisk for a song.

There are better ways to manage market surges like this; I get the appeal of driving up prices but the AI buildout will crash once they hit the peak power production. Best to not screw over your other customers, especially when you're on the same team and under the same corporate parent.

I don't know, I question this.

While the Chinese have been able to reverse engineer and play catch up much faster than Western nations on many technologies (partially because they are less hamstrung by regulation and generally get more support from their governments), there are certain areas where the Chinese have not been able to play catch up. A big one is materials science; it's really hard to go faster on something particularly when a given alloy's specialness comes from fabrication techniques and recipes than reverse engineering a specific system.

The most obvious example of this is aircraft engines. The Chinese power their fighters mainly with the WS-10, a domestically produced engine that has real problems with heat management, thermal expansion, and fuel consumption. Most of these problems came from the metallurgy that goes into the turbine blades. The WS-15 is supposed to fix that, but it's years behind their initial stated goal of deployment and is now starting to be installed, but it's not clear if they solved the issues yet.

I think the same goes with reusable rockets; metallurgy is going to play a huge role in managing heat, friction, and vibration to ensure that the booster can land safely and be certified for reuse, and in this area they are not doing so well.

They will get to the moon, and they will have a reusable rocket, and all that good stuff, but their aerospace industry is still leagues behind Western equivalents.

This isn't my field so I kind of mean this sarcastically and kind of not, but I feel like cyber security audits must be a good business to be in. Get hired to find the vulnerabilities, list out the most basic things and write up a report with recommendations to fix it, then get hired 2 years later to do the same thing and find the exact same stuff. (I'm referencing the fact that the Louvre had an audit in 2014 and then another in late 2015 that found the most basic logic security flaws, which obviously in 2025 weren't fixed per the article). This seems like a lot of repeat business for the same stuff since no one can be bothered to follow up on the security recommendations.

You're entirely correct; Teddy Roosevelt, as awesome of a President as he was, really had a "creative" interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine.

But i would disagree with the premise that getting involved around the world by the US violates the Monroe Doctrine. Far from it, the Monroe Doctrine's specific intent was to keep the problems of Europe (and in today's terms Asia's problems too) out of the Western Hemisphere. The US' geopolitical strategy since the end of WW2 has always been to pit regional powers against each other so that no one regional power could ever grow enough to be a rival to the US Global Hegemony, and many of the US' involvement in things around the world, outside of direct involvement, can be viewed in that lens. Support for Saudi Arabia and Israel, each weaker than Iran, effectively counterbalance Iran who has a natural position to lead the Middle East. Those in turn were replacements for Iraq in the 80's, which we opposed when we had a puppet regime installed in Iran to counterbalance any rising Arab nation, but once we lost Iran we immediately switched to Iraq. The US rebuilding and supporting Japan's economic growth makes it a very natural buffer state to check China and Russia's growth in the Western Pacific. Then through soft power, finance, and the like, we tied most nations to a US-organized rules-based global order, and with the US' giant consumer economy it became far more profitable for countries to sell to the US then to try and challenge the US.

This is why we've often supported dictators over democratically elected governments, or gotten involved in other people's dirty laundry. It's all about ensuring that every country has a choice: challenge the US or do business with the US; those who do business with the US prosper, and those who might challenge the US will find a competitor in their back yard who is supported by the US. All of this means we have not seen an invasion or military action on any nation in the Western Hemisphere from a European or Asian nation since, not counting Pearl Harbor, 1861 and the Second French Invasion of Mexico. I'm not counting the Falkland Islands either, as technically that was Argentina attacking a British territory and happened with the US's consent.

So say what you will about American adventurism, and most of it is valid. But it has kept the Western Hemisphere relatively peaceful compared to the Eastern Hemisphere.

If Trump runs for a third term he'll shoot himself in the foot. Not all of the States will comply to put him on the ballot, which will make it long odds. There is talk that he could be VP with someone else running for President; that's exactly what Putin did with Medvedev, so this might happen. But outside of FDR, every President who sought a third term (there were 6 total, Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, and LBJ since LBJ served less than 2 years of Kennedy's term) were soundly defeated; historically this doesn't go well for Presidents.

But to your other point, I don't know if this action in the Gulf of Mexico will work the same way. The media coverage of these destroyed boats is a mixed bag; even the Trump supporters I know (and I know many) are confused by this. If this is going to be a war in our local hemisphere, they're not doing a good job of spinning the political narrative very well.

Also, this could backfire on him too. US interventions in Latin America generally do not go over well politically. Bay of Pigs was a huge black eye for Kennedy; he's only remembered fondly now because of the Cuban Missile Crisis and, frankly, because he was assassinated on live TV. Iran-Contra was hugely damaging of Reagan's image. Nixon's support of Pinochet in Chile of a military coup was also quite damaging. Biden's mishandling of the border was huge in getting Trump elected. While Bush 1 got a ratings boost with the invasion of Panama, and Panamanian people wanted Noriega out by most polls at the time, the result was a mess and didn't do anything to support Bush politically.

Latin American "adventures" are a mixed bag for US Presidents; the narrative has to be tightly controlled and i just don't see them doing that.

As much as I don't like what the administration is doing in the Gulf, there is a bigger picture to all of it, and weirdly enough it's related to a 200 year old policy, the Monroe Doctrine, particularly it's later addition the Theodore Roosevelt Corollary which was Teddy R's justification that the US should leverage the Monroe Doctrine to justify acting as world police in the affairs of Latin America (all of which is highly against agreed-to treaties such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which admittedly the US is not a signatory and has not ratified.

The US has benefitted from keeping the Western Hemisphere relatively quiet. Yes there are issues, and the occasional big flare up like the Cuban Missile Crisis, but compared to Asia and Europe the entire Western Hemisphere is a very peaceful place.

However we have been of course sanctioning Venezuela over it's former President for life Hugo Chavez and his follower/crony Nicholas Maduro, and Venezuela has suffered greatly from this. Maduro is not nearly as capable as Chavez and he faces credible political threats, so he is drumming up nationalism to stave off political defeat. All of which was exacerbated by the discovery of oil fields in Guyana territorial waters. Now Maduro is threatening to invade Guyana and take over the land that gives those off-shore rights to Guyana, which will A) stave off a political defeat and B) give Venezuela more oil fields to attempt to negotiate some sort of accommodation with the US, particularly because Guyana is friendly to the US and is already developing it with US firms.

So while all of this is ostensibly about drug interdiction, it's really US saber rattling to make Venezuela think twice about invading their neighbor.