He sure seems to be able to just terminate legislation signed into law. He already did it with USAID, and is in the process of doing it to many other departments.
You like this rule being broken? Great, good for you.
What about the other rules? The ones protecting you and the country? Is due process not valuable any more? What protects us from people with bad or selfish intentions?
Yeah, kids starving and dying of cholera.. fuck em /s
> The Inspector General also warned that $489 million in humanitarian food aid was at risk of spoiling due to staff furloughs and unclear guidance. The Office of Presidential Personnel fired the Inspector General the next day, despite a law requiring 30 days notice to Congress before firing an Inspector General.
The correct way for the government to reel in USAID would be for congress to give them less funding and to tell them specifically what they want funded. Regardless if it offends you personally, those are all lawful uses of the money and the only illegal thing that's happened here is the funding being stopped by the President.
First, I would not trust the current USAID disbursement personnel not to piss the money into the wind. I want them gone.
And it's not a question of being offended personally - these are just ridiculous expenses that cannot possibly be justified. But I am indeed offended that the amount 4x of my real estate taxes that I can barely scrape off the bottom of a barrel is being wasted on some opera abroad. If you are wondering why people vote for Trump, this is one of those reasons.
Regarding legality of funding being stopped by the President, I am not a lawyer (and I am guessing neither are you), so I am not going to take your legal opinion on this and will wait for the courts to issue the final ruling.
That they are senseless enough to their their personal opinions on budgeting should run the entire government, and that their little agendas are the reason everything should burn to the ground? Yes, that is why people voted for trump (they are stupid and vindictive).
You can't berate or threaten people into thinking your voting or political opinions are smart/well founded. It either is or it isn't.
Watching Trump illegally destroy institutions that collectively use <5% of the federal budget, while increasing the defect, and rationalizing it as "At least Trump is trying to do something about the runaway government spending" is stupid. Straight up stupid.
The fact that there’s a specific law called the Impoundment Control Act where the specific actions Trump is trying were made illegal should give you a hint to which way the court cases are going to go..
Why are you confident the Supreme Court will not declare the Impoundment Control Act an unconstitutional restriction of executive power? Or declare the only recourse is impeachment? Who do you expect would enforce the ruling you predicted?
That is surely the elephant in the room.. every time it’s been litigated before the court in the past, the Act has been found constitutional but who knows with this specific set of justices and their obsequiousness to Trump and his executive branch.
Those numbers are for the wrong line items, and the WH press secretary was wrong about the source of those funds. Both of those were out of the state department budget, which (putting aside the present murky status) did not oversee USAID at the time.
What can I say... if you are correct about this (there are a lot of claims from both sides but no proofs), I hope DOGE gets its hands on the State Department, too. We have enough worthy causes to take care of inside the US.
Probably because Europe is not threatening them behind the scenes and perhaps offering money as well.
Diversifying chip manufacturing more globally is pretty crucial to maintaining the world order though. Sadly, having a fab in the US under the current administration is not helpful to the west in general. Getting TSMC or building an alternative to TSMC in Europe, UK, Canada, Australia, would be very smart.
I believe a lot of the machines TSMC depends on are even produced in Europe, so there should be room to make some deal!
It went up considerably because of nordic exports to the rest of Europe. They are producing enough for themselves, but not if they have to share.
It's the same reason why US gas prices are somewhat on the high side lately - a lot of it is exported to Europe, and the price differential is large enough to make this worth the trouble.
Seems your average semiconductor foundry needs around 100MW[1] to 200MW[2] of electrical power to operate. The main consumption is down to refrigeration chillers[3].
Average US house uses about 12600kWh per year[4], or 1.44kW average across a year. So that means one foundry takes about what 70k to 140k houses would take.
For any energy intensive industry there is always the option to build new wind and solar for relatively cheap. But labor is cheaper and less regulated in the US and we make it easy to hire skilled immigrants. Having a pro-coal president probably doesn't hurt (but having an anti-wind president might).
I think the bigger reasons are the security and trade issues. The US has embraced protectionism and is withdrawing from security obligations, yet Taiwan requires both US trade and US security guarantees to survive. Unlike with Ukraine, no other powers look capable of filling those roles if Trump keeps pursuing his America First agenda.
You realize that the US buys energy from Canada right? The US has no advantage on energy. Even in Europe, building more power capacity is simply a matter of wanting to.
Right. I do. The US buys a lot of it, and it is cheap.
As for Europe, you are right, partially it's a matter of a mindset, however there are objective reasons for expensive energy. France's access to cheap uranium is almost gone. Europe refuses to sign long-term russian gas delivery contracts and are buying spot which costs arm and leg (whatever is left of it). German power plants are shuttered. LNG imported from the US is very expensive.
Some German CEOs (I think Volkswagen if I recall correctly) said recently that Germany offers no competitive advantage these days. I agree.
Where do you think manufacturing will go? Energy is everything.
However hard it is, the decline of the US is going to force Europe and the rest of the western countries to build out replacements for US labour and goods. The US is simply not a reliable trading partner nor ally under the new administration. Energy will be built.
Its weird to claim that the US is in decline when discussing the EU. The fate of the EU is incredibly intertwined with that of the US. If one is in decline, the other is as well.
The fall of the US will absolutely harm other western countries yes. But we will build and eventually thrive, unlike the US if it remains on its current trajectory.
I'm sorry but that's such an odd statement. One of the reasons people are saying that the US is currently falling or something is because they aren't as keen on defending Europe as they once were. The point is that Europe cannot even realistically defend itself.
Euro nationalism is so weird to me. I can't think of any metric where the US is doing worst (a part from healthcare and other social issues but those have always been worse in the US). Like in what way do you think that Europe is somehow stronger than the US? By the way this is coming from someone who isn't american, it's just weird that you actually think that Europe's trajectory is somehow towards a thriving future but the US is on its way to fail.
I remember the same doom and gloom and boasting from Europeans back in 2016, but it turns out that even with Trump Europe still didn't manage to outpace economically the US by 2020, or 2024. In fact the gap has widened.
The US and European alliance was a marriage of convenience. One of the results of Ukrainian conflict was manufacturing moving from Europe to the US.
Energy has to be built from something, and Europe does not have it.
Europe has sun and wind. In the time it would take the US to build one nuclear plant Europe can build over 10x as much renewable capacity, for 1/10th the cost. As much as I'm pro environmental protection, the reality is that a lot of places are preferring renewables because they are cheaper and faster to build than traditional power plants for the same energy outputs. Even Texas is building tons of renewables for this reason.
So yes, energy will be built in Europe and elsewhere.
Here's the real time state of Finland's power grid. Zoom out to the month view. Solar is pitiful this time of the year, and wind is horribly inconsistent. Some days the wind doesn't blow at all and the fossil fuel "co-generation" plants need to be spun up. You can't just ignore the demand for reliable, base load power.
One word: BS. Germany energy shortages were in the news early this year, and last year, and the year before then. See this, for example: https://www.power-technology.com/news/germany-wind-power-sho... Germany and its renewables is just a laughing stock at this point. One cannot run an industry on renewables, and they are finding this out. There was already some talk about restarting nuclear power plants.
With your optimism, they would have tackled this problem already.
Texas already paid its price for their lack of investment in traditional generation facilities.
Language? What about principles of freedom, democracy, and science? I would think that those things would be why US scientists choose Canada and Europe first. I doubt language is really high on the list.
Language and ease of immigration are going to be very important to the decision of where to move. Naturally, those things you mentioned are important, but so is language.
Where I live now you can 3d print an unregistered and unserialized pistol then stuff it under your shirt (loaded) and walk into the unsecured part of a public airport without breaking the law, all with zero paperwork or licenses or checks. Can I do that in Switzerland?
Well for one, Europe has a history of gassing disarmed people and those on registries, for two locking your gun up to pick someone up from the airport just presents an unnecessary opportunity for it to be stolen.
Why is it a good thing to put someone into a tiny cage for victimless possession crimes?
Why must I convince you why whatever I do is good to preserve my rights? Fuck all that.
Europe is a pretty big place with a lot of disparate governments. Abstracting it to merely "Europe" is ignoring how the world operates. Many European governments have been actively expanding and enshrining rights of individuals.
Secondly, none of your points are pertinent to the day-to-day of anyone in academic research/science. Perhaps only to the irrationally paranoid.
Look, I am from Spain, currently living in Japan, two very safe countries with some of the lowest rates of crimes in the world. I have met plenty of Americans living in both places, and do you know what they told me? 1) They love having a functional healthcare system that won't bankrupt them, and 2) they also love being able to walk around, specially at night, without the fear of being shot by a random asshole.
So it turns out that with safety comes real freedom, the freedom to go on with your life without fear. Their words, not mine.
So please, tell me again why having guns is a good idea.
I'm absolutely open to the idea that some people find more freedom with less liberties and more safety.
There are plenty of nice things about Japan. Most Americans who are capable of moving to Japan do not, for one reason or another. The ones capable of doing so generally self select because it jives with their desired way of life. I know of Japanese who moved here and are now gun toting Americans.
Perhaps the spice of life is if you value certain liberties more than life itself, maybe America is an option for you. I'm not totally convinced this is even the case with guns in the long run -- it does seem disarmament buys some short term safety for some people at the expense of long term vulnerability that their government, or external or internal forces, can exploit their disarmed state. This has happened in the US to the Indians, to the Jews in Europe, and to the Filipinos by the Japanese.
I'm saying there is a place with some of the most liberal non commercial speech and strongest gun rights in the world, certain people value this, and if they are like me they're not living their life in fear that these liberties might come with certain additional risks.
Having experience in this area, audit, legal, confidence intervals are essential. No, you don't end up "passing every single document" to human review. That's made up nonsense. But confidence intervals can pretty easily flag poorly OCR'd documents, and then yes they are done by human review.
If you try to pitch hallucinations to these fields, they'll just choose 100% manual instead. It's a non-starter.
I work in a health insurance adjacent field. I can see my work going the way of the dodo as soon as VLLs take off in interpreting historical health records with physicians’ handwriting.
There is already a decent cloud industry in Europe. OVH has been around for decades, and many companies in North America even use them because they are often a bit cheaper. But you also have newer players like Scaleway and CDNs like Bunney.net that are growing fast.
I think the harder services to replace are things like Github and O365/Google Workplace.
"Cloud" is not boxes like OVH and Hetzner sell. Cloud is a gigantic software layer offering all kinds of features and abstractions.
I think it'd be faster and cheaper to replicate GitHub or even Office, which are complex but fairly feature-stable, than to offer a real cloud competitor with a fraction of the services that Amazon, Microsoft or Google offer in their cloud portfolios.
I heard an interesting thought on the Lex Friedman podcast though. If software engineering really becomes cheaper and more readily available thanks to AI, maybe more companies will start building more of their own services. Then, maybe then, will the European enterprise be able to wean itself off from the big cloud vendors.
I know what Cloud is, and OVH has a cloud, with many of the same services as AWS. Even Bunny can be configured via terraform. So the reality today is that AWS and other cloud offerings have strong alternatives, but Office and Github don't.
Excuse me? Based on what? In my time in academia exactly zero researchers would claim that their work is somewhat bullshit.
As a society, there is laughably little support for science, instead the majority of policy and business decisions are based on fairy tales and snake oil. We need more trust in science.
Seems to me that the review worked, you caught the plagiarism, even though the other two missed it. It's disturbing that somehow the paper author found your contact information though!
