Not quite... from what we've seen so far, the "negotiated" outcome is objectively worse for the US -- but Trump ends up personally wealthier. And it's the personal benefit to Trump that is really what he's after. Partly self-enrichment, mostly the feeling that he can make the world grovel.

I think the pre-Reagan rates were sufficient. A balance is required; extremely high rates just motivate the wealthy to work harder to find workarounds.

Creating public debate

Ok, then, let's give them what they want.

I'll start. I am an admittedly selfish American. Fuck everyone else. Fuck everyone who isn't me. From that premise, what are the advantages of renaming the gulf? Sure, it's causing some seemingly-unnecessary expense, but that's balanced by ..

...

..uh, sorry, I'm drawing a blank. How can the gulf rename give me an advantage? What is the upside to doing this? If I come out ahead at someone else's expense, that's great. I want to do that. I hope someone else loses and their life gets worse, as long as my life gets better, even if just a tiny bit. But how does my life get better from this? I'm fine if a thousand children are raped and murdered as collateral damage, as long as I get a penny. So where the fuck is my penny?!

Surely, someone has an answer to this.

Bullshit. There are multiple Supreme Court rulings upholding the free speech rights of non-citizens. I recommend you start with Bridges v Wixon. And even the current very-conservative court is going to rule against the administration in the end, just watch.

Also, I notice that you ignored the points about suppression of freedom of the press or the ability of lawyers to advocate for clients who oppose the government. Care to point out where Obama did those things?

I'm pro-automation for all jobs, and IRS workers are no exception. If you can automate these jobs, that's great. But whoever is in charge of this is either unintelligent or inexperienced.

In the past when a customer and I automated a job, we did things in a special order that I think would surprise the hell out of Bessent. My big trade secret (should I be leaking this?!) is this:

First, you think about how to do the job. Then you think about what the code should do. Then you write the code, test it, and then have a little trial in production, and see how it goes. Eventually you gain confidence and then finally .. how about that, my customer just removed those positions.

Notice how the word "think" appeared a lot at the beginning of the above schedule, and getting rid of the humans who made sure the job was getting done, came at the very end? My proprietary ordering of these operations is how I got a big advantage. (Yeah, I probably shouldn't be leaking this.)

It turns out that aiming after you fire instead of before, results in a much lower percentage of your shots hitting the target. I wonder if Bissent is traveling backwards in time. That would explain how they got rid of the workers first and now they're nebulously speculating on how they might, some day about a decade from now, create automation to replace the workers they got rid of way back in 2025.

I get that you're (rightly) pissed at Trump and Elon, but that's just dead wrong. SpaceX isn't getting any handouts from the federal government. They're getting launch contracts, yes, but at a lower price point than any other launch provider, ever. Hate on Elon all you like, but the Falcon 9 is the cheapest and most reliable orbital rocket ever built, and has reduced US space launch costs enormously, especially if you count the political costs of being beholden to Russia for space access. Or would you rather go back to the space shuttle, with per-launch costs of upwards of $2B, rather than the ~$80M SpaceX charges?

He's also firing most of the IRS, which means the wealthy just have to make sure their taxes are complicated to cheat, since the IRS won't have the staff to review anything complex. On paper they might owe more (even assuming he's not just blowing smoke, which he probably is, and even assuming he can get it passed, which he probably can't), but in practice gutting the IRS means they'll pay less.

At the same time his tariff policies are hammering the economy, which will reduce revenues, and he's cutting taxes, which will reduce revenues, and he's decimating the value of T-bills, which will increase debt servicing costs. Deficits are gonna skyrocket, and stagflation is going to set in. We're going to need another Jimmy Carter to make the hard decisions to fix the economy when Trump is done with it... and they'll be all the harder because Trump is also working to exclude us from international trade and to remove the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency.

We are so screwed.

I've been in Canada all week. Seems very nice. The massive pro-life protest at the capitol yesterday was a little annoying, just because it was hard to get through the packed crowds, but good on them for having free speech, even on topics their government disagrees with. I don't think the news media that cover the issue or the law firms that file cases about it even get sued or lose access to work with government!

Free speech seems like a pretty cool idea. Maybe we should try it in the US.

Anyway, it's time for me to log off and wipe my devices. I'm about to head to the airport and I don't want ICE to see this post and detain me, or send me to an El Salvadoran gulag.

I can imagine.

Easier than cancelling gmail.

Both the EU and UK are participating in international standardization efforts, so it will work fine. It'll take some time to get there, of course.

Plastic cards suck, for many reasons.

1. They're forgeable. Digitally-signed data is not. Sure, governments can and do implement lots of anti-forgery mechanisms, but it takes almost as much expertise to use those anti-forgery mechanisms to validate a legitimate card as it does to fake one. Approximately no one checking plastic cards knows how to properly validate them. Digital ID cards require a bit of equipment to check them, but the equipment is ubiquitous (almost every smartphone in existence has all of the tech necessary, all you need is an app), and unless the attacker can either pwn the verification device or subvert the legitimate issuing system, they're unforgeable.

2. They cannot provide data minimization. Electronic IDs enable you to provide only the subset of data that is needed for the current use. For example, if you're buying alcohol the only information the store needs is whether you're over the minimum age. They don't need your home address, your driving privileges, your name... they don't even need your birthdate. Just a single yes/no bit -- plus some way to prove that the person presenting the ID is the legitimate holder (there are some good privacy-preserving options here, but that's a subject for another post). Contrast that to a plastic card with all the info printed on the front and repeated in a 2D barcode on the back, enabling easy snarfing of the whole data set. Digital IDs are better for privacy than plastic cards.

3. They don't work online. We use various workarounds for this, but they're all far worse for privacy, requiring users to provide far more information about themselves, not only beyond what's minimally necessary for the transaction, but even beyond what the ID card has. This is because the most important information isn't so much the content of the card as the proof of authenticity.

In the future we're going to look back at the era of ID cards and papers and shudder at how bad they are.

Of course, there are also risks. The biggest one is that having an ID that does work online means that more online services will want to use that ID. This is good where it enables transactions that currently can't happen online at all, and probably good where it makes transactions that occur now but are risky less risky. It's bad where it facilitates user data collection and user identification for transactions that don't really need it at all. But IMO that risk is better managed refusing to provide ID when it really isn't warranted, and by insisting that when ID presentation does make sense that the data provided is held to the absolute minimum required, rather than forgoing all of the other privacy, usability and security benefits of digital IDs.

steal millions of dollars of financial aid

Why are you giving them any money at all, before you even know who they are?

I don't know. In what city should human taxi drivers stop driving because of snow?

If the humans say yes and then kill some of their passengers, and Waymo says no and doesn't kill anyone, then I think Waymo wins some bragging rights. Or at least their liability lawyers would look pretty smug.

Just Say No is an underused strategy, and I'm really just trying to say that as a service, Waymo can use it when they think it's the right one for the moment, whereas someone like Tesla would have a much harder time. Humans drivers have access to that strategy too, but we're usually too stupid to remember, or too stupid to be willing to "puss out." I know, because I am one of those stupid humans, though I haven't killed anyone yet.

Under those conditions, the people are already in a bad situation, whether Waymo exists or not.

Why would anyone care whether the driver who says "No" is a robot or a human? No means it matters even less than if they had said yes.