So…are people rebelling against the “established order” of the 1980s? Rebelling against offshoring production of useful stuff, while the US becomes a “service economy” of highly paid financial speculators, and low paid burger flippers? That is pushing back against a lot of well entrenched, well funded, vested interests in the current “established order”.
Steve
I don’t follow the USA closely enough to answer that except to say that The Establishment is not permanent, New Establishments replace Old Establishments every so often.
What I do know is that the America I got to know and love in my youth no longer exists and I would be most happy if the spirit of that Old Establishment were to return. I was in Silicon Valley from 1985 to 1990 when the quota systems were first applied to enforce Civil Rights and I predicted it would end badly and it has.
The Captain
learned to sail at the MIT Sailing Pavilion on the Charles River. I never was good at sports and I didn’t particularly like them. Told I had to take sports to graduate I opted for swimming as the least distasteful sport. I said to the coach, “I’d like to join the swimming team. What should I do?” “Do 20 laps.” Twenty laps later I said to the coach, “I did 20 laps. What should I do now?” “Do 20 more.” After twenty more laps
I said to the coach, “I did 20 more laps. What should I do now?” “Do 20 more.” “Do 20 more laps?” I asked myself, "I think I saw something like a sailing pavilion by the river. I think I’ll give that a try. The next day I went to the sailing pavilion and said to the fellow there, “I would like to join the sailing team.” He gave me a broom and told me to sweep the pavilion. “Sweep the pavilion?” I asked. “Yes.” I did and the rest is history. BTW I never got on the sailing team but it was a blast!
I think you have it almost exactly backwards. This election wasn’t revolutionary, it was reactionary.
Overthrowing the current health care system would be to go to single payer. Overthrowing the current political system would be to eliminate the electoral college. Overthrowing the dominant white male culture would be to emphasize diversity. Overthrowing the current economic system that increases wealth inequality would be to redistribute wealth. Those are all liberal ideas.
This election was won by those who want to keep America mostly white by restricting immigration. It was won by those who want to keep using fossil fuels. It was won by those who are against change.
Hey, your side won so you have the right to gloat. But now your side now has to deliver. I honestly hope the new incoming ruling regime will be able to decrease the deficit while keeping the economy strong and without making things worse for the working poor.
I am skeptical. I suspect what will happen will be policies that increase the deficit, reduce government services, increase the number of people without health insurance, and increase wealth inequality. History repeating itself (see Reagan, Bush Jr, and Trump version 1).
You are concerned about a debt that will require “spending $1 Trillion on interest payments” while the focus of the incoming administration will be tax cuts that reduces the revenue needed to pay down the debt. Cognitive dissonance anyone?
I would have it backwards had the establishment won. 
The Captain
Coming back to the title of the thread. This is a $ Trillion asset. It will become clear to everyone in a few years once xAI/Grok partnership matures.
Your naïveté is charming.
Thank you!
The Captain
All of defense is waste. That’s because blowing stuff up and killing people doesn’t really make the world a better place. But even if we eliminated all defense, the deficit would still be over a trillion bucks a year.
We are like the Roman Empire was. We are consuming more and more and more of our resources to govern ourselves. And it always ends the same way, just nobody knows when.
So true, and that map doesn’t even show Alaska. There’s a lot of acreage in that state that all voted red.
You’re being too generous labeling it a mistake. Sure, for some dummies who don’t understand that land mass doesn’t vote, we should call it a mistake or plain ignorance. For others who know better, posting the image to justify their political views is dishonest.
Then again, the stark differences between North and South Korea indicate that “blowing stuff up and killing people” back in the '50s made the world a better place.
DB2
Yep, it is…until you need it. Like insurance, which is a complete waste…until you need it. Like seatbelts and airbags in cars…until you get in a crash.
The main point in talking about defense waste is the truly unnecessary expenditures that sole source contractors receive as beneficiaries; the expenditures for the oft-cited $800 toilet seats, the jet contracts that go on for years, etc., etc. Of course, you need a good monitor or monitoring system for something as vast as the US defense budget, but it is undeniable that vast amounts of waste occur.
Pete
Bernie wrote an editorial in the Boston Globe. It is an important read.
He is putting a fire hose on the fire. Note he is the only prominent person doing so.
I should say effectively.
We need Shapiro to show up. He is the most FDR like. He might be stumbling over the loss in PA.
That’s quite a stretch. Facebook has 6 times the users, acceptance in the advertising community, and is barely a trillion dollar asset. (Market cap $1.5B, which includes What’sApp, Instagram, Threads, and Facebook.) The original investors in X have written down their investments by more than 2/3, which puts it (currently) at somewhere around $15B. To get to $1T, it only needs to grow, uh, let’s see, multiply by 5, carry the 1, something like a bazillion percent.
From context, I think he’s just assuming that xAI will be one of the early winners in finding a commercially rewarding “killer app” for AI/AGI, and that Twitter/X will benefit from having access to that killer app through the Grok/xAI relationship. Not that Musk has some secret sauce for making the 2022-era “Twitter” platform itself worth $1 trillion.
We have been speculating that current relationships will result in XAI being given the inside track on such a “killer ap”, with such profit potential that it doesn’t matter if Tesla goes to zero, to feed the mob’s distaste for EVs.
Blast from the past, now with better tools.
I’ve done a bunch of work for the military over the years, and ironically one of the reasons why it is so wasteful are because of rules designed to limit waste, fraud, and abuse, and show accountability to the taxpayers. But the complying with the rules requires an enormous amount of extra work, so the costs of everything inflated enormously, and that doesn’t even include the costs of buying stuff we don’t need.
Reducing head count by itself is the lazy way to cut costs. It works, but the agency still has to accomplish the same mission only with fewer people.
The reason why Bill Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” reforms worked is they went to people who worked at the agencies and asked them what needed to be done to make things more efficient and identified existing reformers within the agencies. The increase in efficiency allowed a reduction in headcount while improving customer satisfaction. But it took eight years of effort and they still weren’t close to being done. So I’m skeptical there are quick fixes here.
One potential (speculation):
X with real time breaking news from all over the world + xAI = Stock market catalyst.
What will you pay to subscribe for something like this ?
One can trade stocks, currencies, coffee, oil, Zinc etc.
Nothing. Why would I pay for something that takes public information and runs it through a generalized AI, without some indication that the AI was able to do anything valuable with the information?
If anyone actually develops a stock-picking AI, they won’t offer it as a subscription. They’d make their money running a fund. You know, like Jim Simons did at Renaissance. Because if you have an algorithm or AI that can successfully pick investments, the profit maximizing thing to do is keep it for yourself - the more people that use it the more the trade gets eroded, until it has no value at all.
The same as I pay for other financial advice. 30 years ago that was the “fee” that mutual fund “advisors” extracted from me for being stupid. I ended that fee roughly 29 years ago and haven’t paid anything since.
