that doesnt really work if they have to compete on price with foreign producers that have lower labor costs, looser environmental regulations, deeper supply chains and better process knowledge. might as well eat the tax (waiting for monopolistic opportunities) or light the money on fire
That's not how it works in the U.S. If an executive branch department was created by the legislature, it is up to the legislature whether or not it exists, not the executive. If the legislature has passed laws regarding how its resources are to be used, its employees treated, the executive is not free to disregard those laws.
The legislature is the source of laws in the U.S., not the executive. The irony is that the Republicans control the legislature as well. They could pass laws to achieve what Musk wants. It would be slow, but it would be legal.
A coup is seizing power outside the legal mechanism for doing so.
It's actually not up to the legislature anymore. And that's a huge problem in this country. The legislature exited stage left by handing way too many powers and responsibilities over to the executive branch. Now the courts determine if the executive branch has been previously allowed by congress to do something stupid or not. By the time the legislature can agree on exercising power on one item or another, the shit has already hit the fan.
It doesn't need to be a coup. Congress sold us out to presidents long before most of us were born.
we were talking about operational access to the payment system. you are conflating the situation at USAID which may or may not by illegal, idk.
the legislative branch can form administrative departments and prescribe their function however the president has already defined powers to impound funds and remove senior administrative officers and appoint/remove low-level staff. how these things intersect will be sorted be the courts.
executive actions (by-passing what should be legislation) have been increasing the last few decades. the various media companies plainly do make choices to portray some actions as nothingburger or crisis depending on their political alignment with the party in power.
the issue with the left-media and Trump is they outrage clickbait a bunch of events that are insignificant in terms of outcomes. Should they alarm about Jan6 yes. should they alarm over minor personnel at treasury or some dumb unserious thing Trump said at a press conference, no. This is how the media loses all trust in themselves broadly.
Playing by those rules, it's nearly impossible to change any big law or enact any drastic change to an existing law unless you have some world-changing event. The rest is just the slow march towards the mean which is controlled by the people that can bully others into silence and agreement. The mean is controlled by those that control the conversation and by those career politicians and bureaucrats that "play the game". Look how magically everyone is agreeing to deporting violent criminals, yet somehow we didn't all think that was the right answer 6 months ago?
It's beyond me how so many of us think that continuously ignoring the will of the people is "OK". Either tell me my choice doesn't matter, or just shut up with the drama and enact safe and fair referendums on every single hot topic so we can all get to the right answer and then if we find we're in the minority, we'll shut up.
It should be clear as day to anyone that is unbiased that fixing the US/Mexican border was ridiculously easy (it's essentially been done in 2 weeks and they didn't even have to finish building their stupid wall). The only reason it didn't happen till now was precisely because the whole thing is broken and not really an expression of the peoples' will. It was rather an expression of an amalgamation of a giant mindless mass of bureaucrats, and you can't fix it unless you do what they are doing now. Not to single you out sorry, but opinions like yours ("we gotta do it the legal way and according to rules x, y, z, and 500 other rules") are precisely why nothing ever got done or fixed properly. And I say that as someone that is absolutely on board with following every rule to the T, with no exceptions.
I agree that our system of government makes it extremely difficult to enact large changes. That is by design, however well considered that design might be. Nevertheless, those are the rules. Which means the president can't legally do whatever he wishes to anything "under his purview" upon gaining power.
Or rather, that was the case until the SCOTUS decided there are no laws the president need respect. What they have not pronounced upon is whether the law binds anyone acting under the direction of the president. Does their invention merely protect the president from prosecution or does it abrogate all laws he finds inconvenient? I find it hard to believe they'll take the second step, but we'll probably find out pretty soon. Is Musk a monarch or merely our president?
>It should be clear as day to anyone that is unbiased that fixing the US/Mexican border was ridiculously easy (it's essentially been done in 2 weeks and they didn't even have to finish building their stupid wall). The only reason it didn't happen till now was precisely because the whole thing is broken and not really an expression of the peoples' will.
Fixing the border happened 8 months ago. Nothing meaningful has changed at the border since June 2024. The only reason it took so long is that Biden wanted Congress to do it rather than using probably-illegal executive fiat powers, and eventually Biden got tired of waiting and did it anyway after Trump told Congress to axe the bipartisan border deal that bascially everybody but the extremists on either side was on board with.
You can make an argument that Biden should have done it by executive fiat even earlier, and that's your prerogative. But the fact of the matter is that even once a legislative fix was ready, Trump and the Republicans threw it away for no good reason, so that he could continue campaigning on immigration. That, by the way, is exactly "not an expression of the peoples' will". That's refusing to fix a problem for the sole purpose of campaigning on that problem.
Much of Trump's governance is like an episode of reality TV or WWE. Loud, flashy and mostly fake. Creating his own problems to "solve" by changing nothing. Threaten Canada and Mexico with tariffs then cancel them and declare victory when they say they'll do something they were already doing, e.g. Mexico deployed 10,000 Mexican troops to their border years ago under an agreement with Biden. Columbia accepted hundreds of deportation flights under Biden, then Trump tries to use military aircraft to do it and they say no, he makes threats then he declares massive victory when the arrangement reverts to exactly what was happening before.
Data obtained by fox news suggested that migrant arrivals at the southern border declined by 60% in the first week of Trump’s presidency compared to the last week of Biden’s administration. However, this figure differs from Trump’s 93% claim.
Biden 2021: 1,734,686 (378.68% from previous year)
Biden 2022: 2,378,944 (137.14% from previous year)
Biden 2023: 2,475,669 (104.07% from previous year)
Biden 2024: 2,135,005 (86.24% from previous year)
I couldn't find older that 2019, but it's clear that in trumps last year, it more than halfed from his previous year. Then it more than tripled in the first year under Biden. Then almost doubled again in the subsequent year under Biden, and then grew a bit in 2023. Then only in 2024, did it reduce by a tiny 14%. Notably a 14% of what is effectively a number 5 times higher than what Trump got it down to before he left office.
And yeah you could argue (like some of the journalist did) that "oh this is just because Trump created a backlog". Well that's what people wanted, and it stopped the flow of people over the border. That's solving the problem, and really just shows that Biden literally just opened the doors, let it grow huge, and then "claimed success" when it started going back down to it's pre-Trump average. This is why we can't discuss this, we have so many supposedly "smart" people arguing and using the supposed "data" to twist the truth, and then dismissing what every can see plain as day (and is in this case supported by the data).
Oh and let's also not mention that it surged quite a bit in the last few months of 2024 when people I would assume started to flood the border in anticipation of Trump's arrival. So all that supposed work the Biden team did somehow didn't apply then? Of course, because they did nothing and the numbers reflect the fact that the border just lets them go through.
You can't attack other users like that here, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. Worse, you've been doing this repeatedly in other places:
I don't want to ban you because your commenting history before that looks (mostly) fine. But if you keep breaking the site rules, we won't have much choice, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.
the strength of the US defense commitment is likely proportional to the strategic value of the economic assets they still hold. the taiwanese have every incentive to do just well enough at the AZ plant for the $39 Billion checks to clear and no better
While true, TSMC has a stronger incentive for its own survival than the survival of Taiwan. If it's easier for them to shift operations to the US and continue to make $$$, I suspect they'd do that over retaining operations in Taiwan and hoping it will convince the US to protect the country.
the really dumb thing about working at AWS is they pay so much lip service to Ops, literally you can spend a third of a week in meetings talking about Ops Issues, but not a single long term project to improve the deeper architectural problems that cause bad Ops ever get funded.
they should have focused on building light-duty utility vehicles based on the Model Y platform. A ModelY Truck could be like the Ford Maverick or a 90s Tacoma, the Van could be like Ford Transit Connect. It would be significantly faster to market, re-using the some of the production lines, and there's a huge market (landscaping, residential trades, short-haul delivery, etc). Elon was high off his own supply the year he launched CT, Semi, & Roadster
Our local Tesla dealer just got a Cybertruck on display last week and I went and took a look at it last weekend. My impression is the front end is actually pretty good looking, they rounded it off quite a bit from the original prototype and it has a similar shape as other Tesla models like the Y. The headlight bar is actually really cool and the frunk is probably pretty big. The back half of the Cybertruck is a travesty, in addition to just being really angular and ugly they lost some of the most useful aspects of being a truck, like being able to throw gear over the side of the bed, or being able to put a custom cap on the back. The Cybertruck is excessively long for all the more cargo capacity it gives you, all because of that ugly angular back end. A lot of people are probably going to shy away from buying one because it's not going to fit in their garage. The custom tires are probably going to cost a fortune to replace as well, for no real good reason other than looks. In short Tesla designed 50% of a pretty cool truck, it really could have changed the segment.
What's a "custom cap"? Is it like a tonneau cover (I'm from Aus, not sure if they're a thing in other countries)? Or something more like a tailgate pad for bikes?
Tonneau is the flat cover for the bed. A cap is the n-shaped cover that encloses it, giving it a roof. Typically matching the cab body work, so overall looks more like an SUV.
The funny thing is, it's not a single piece of metal anymore, they completely ditched the whole "exoskeleton". The Cybertruck is made just like the Model Y, with casted front and back ends attached to an upper frame with body panels. If you look at recent pictures you can see the lines between all the body panels. The panels are stainless steel and probably are a little thicker than a typical body panel so they might be a little more resistant to dents, but that's about it.
feel like the board is too small and a handful of them kicked him out over personal agendas - which are incoherent and hence they cant explain it publicly
- Ilya for decel (but really tech fame jealously)
- Adam for a CoI with his startup (but really founder fame jealousy)
- Helen Toner for Sam disagreeing with her research in EA, safety and decel
and somewhere 2 teams of Software Engineers are tasked with Test Case 7462628: a Video classifier to detect when the AV has stopped on top of human and pinned them beneath its wheels
If your capital cost is low, you can buy growth (sell below cost) and use that to distract investors for a long time. Capital costs are not going to be low anymore. A lot of investors are going to blow up and be more skeptical/disciplined.
DINK > Solo >> anything else