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.

3% is not going to be enough, expect 3 times as much cuts by the year end, then twice more as much in the following year. The money isn't flowing, once the money is not flowing the cuts start. Money flows when the economy expands due to actual increase of production or money flows when it is handed out for free by borrowing, printing. Once the flow slows down or stops, the music stops, everyone tries to grab the closest chair. Every company will be shrinking this year and in the subsequent years, until the attitudes change, government actually shrinks by a couple of orders of magnitude, rules that prevent productivity become unenforceable and/or are rescinded, gold replaces fake paper as money, then people will start rebuilding.

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.

you know, over a decade ago I wrote here that the government will be eliminated, that gold will become defacto currency, that debts will have to be paid and restructured, that laws will have to be rolled back, that government will be scaled down due to self destruction and lack of productivity. This id happening. I postulate that government has no authority and that individual has the right not to be stolen from by the government. The country you speak of used to exist before this giant government and it will exist after it.

Imagine for a moment that government is 100% efficient, so it is that efficient at taking money from Bob to subsidize Jane. The problem is not lack of efficiency, fraud or abuse, the problem is the very concept that Bov should be feeding Jane and that government will enforce that.

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 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.

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.

Well, at least they'll continue marketing their devices as energy-efficient. They will probably quickly discover, however, that it's a lot cheaper and easier to put outstanding energy efficiency figures on the box and in the marketing materials than it is to actually make the devices efficient. Truth in advertising laws mean they probably can't just flat out lie about efficiency (well, assuming Trump doesn't shut down the FTC department tasked with enforcing truth in advertising laws -- or hasn't already done so), but they can certainly measure creatively.

Yes, that's what it will do, make their new appliances less efficient by enabling device manufacturers to quote misleading energy consumption figures. Energy Star doesn't make the appliances more efficient, but it provides trustworthy assertions about appliance energy efficiency, based on careful testing.

Absolutely. They've been educated to look for the Energy Star efficiency ratings.

That's obviously very important, but you aren't seriously arguing that the US hasn't played the pre-eminent role in technology development and productization for most of the last century, are you? Also, for the particular example you mention, it should be pointed out that mRNA vaccine technology was developed primarily in the US, based on research funded by the US NIH, and also that your "three out of four top COVID vaccines" characterization is misleading [*]. Though it should also be pointed out that most of the key mRNA researchers were not native-born Americans, but were attracted to live and work in the US by the high standard of living and top-notch research institutions available here. You know, the situation Trump is destroying.

The free world needs Europe to step up and do both basic research and engineering and productization, because the US is apparently going to focus on monster trucks from here on out.

[*] The two top two mRNA-based vaccines were from a US company (Moderna) and a US/German collaboration (Pfizer/BioNTech). Third place was definitely the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine which was purely European. I'm not sure which you picked as fourth place. By WHO approval, it would have to be the Jansen vaccine, which was a US/Netherlands collaboration. By doses delivered it would be the Sinovac vaccine, which neither the US nor Europe had any role in.