The status of Iran’s nuclear sites (and more importantly, its stockpile of enriched uranium) is anyone’s guess at this point. It’s likely that no one truly knows, not even the Iranians. It will take significantly more time to get a clear answer.
That said, it may not matter much. Restarting their nuclear program in secret would likely be far more difficult now and would almost certainly be detected. Ideally, a political agreement will soon render the issue moot.
> The status of Iran’s nuclear sites (and more importantly, its stockpile of enriched uranium) is anyone’s guess at this point. It’s likely that no one truly knows, not even the Iranians.
The project is dispersed and hardened enough that a single attack probably wont' be a decisive blow.
The surprising thing is that Iran doesn't have an atomic bomb yet. Enrichment is the hard part. Building an A-bomb from enriched uranium is not that difficult. The technology is 80 years old and most of it is well known. It's no worse than building, say, an auto engine from scratch, something racing shops do routinely.
It is fascinating how design has become the new gold standard in the AI era. It really looks the strongest signals come from taste and design quality and AI is killing other signals.
What design are we talking about? An interface with a text input box at the bottom, chat view on top and a list of previous conversations on the left? Takes an entry level engineer a few hours to come up with that, not a $6.5B design firm and Jony Ive.
For some designs, sure — AI will likely generate most of the UX for, say, SaaS products. But when it comes to high-quality, innovative designs, humans will lead.
I believe in crypto, I think it will even protect people online when done right.
And not everything is scam, there are good projects. That being said the behavior of people and organizations in crypto is poor and will slow adoption. I still regularly see major crypto ecosystems rug pull their own developers. They simply can’t help themselves.
> And not everything is scam, there are good projects.
I don't disagree, but at this point it has to be like 90% of crypto products are scams, and that number is still increasing. They're simply running out of people to scam. The 18-40 year old male demo can only lose so much on crypto and sports betting before they run out of money and credit. It's a giant ponzi that's losing it's legs. I'm sure it doesn't help that everything else is so expensive (housing), making these hail mary gambas more attractive, but the money will dry up regardless.
We need to stop telling people they will make money with crypto. It is akin telling people they will make money with PostgreSQL. In both cases, if they build a great business, they may become successful and make some money. But looking at crypto through the lens of becoming rich quick is flowed.
Stellar and the United Nation joining forces to advance financial inclusion as a quick example. People can downvote me all they want due to biases, these projects do exist.
Has there been any results from it? The only online results I see are from January, when it was announced, and frankly I'm not even sure I understand what the methodology or goals are.
And very soon that will apply to packages with values below $800 as the de minimis exemption is being phased out I reckon. Not exactly business-friendly, the government should be able to handle the load before enacting these rules at least.
> the government should be able to handle the load before enacting these rules at least.
No, no… that’s the point. We often think of costs in monetary values only. Costs are two-dimensional: money and time to acquire the good. This is a tariff on time.
This reminds me of Galileo - the U.S. tried everything they could to kill this "European GPS". It is pretty clear today that giving up on it would have been a catastrophic mistake. Europe should not risk make the same mistake with critical infrastructures ever again. It is time for Europe to build.
> The frequency initially chosen for Galileo would have made it impossible for the US to block the Galileo signals without also interfering with its own GPS signals. [...], but they have since reached the compromise that Galileo is to use different frequencies. This allows the blocking or jamming of either GNSS without affecting the other.
In the middle to long term though, Europe should and will decouple from the US in defense and tech. US influence will be reduced. European almost made a fatal mistake with Galileo that the US wanted to kill [0] and I don't think they will make that mistake again. F-35, Starlink, air defense will be built by European companies.
That’s fine if Trump wants to spend less or even withdraw from NATO.
Doing it like it just did with basically no notice is a stabbing in the back to former allies of the US. And Republicans are also not saying much.
That behavior should and very likely will not be forgotten by Europe.
The next phase that makes sense is an iron curtain between 4 blocks (US, Europe, Russia, China). Like during the Cold War, it is the approach that will minimize the risk of war.
Totally agree that Trump is trading long-term dominance for short-term gains.
I think that in a few months, we will see the U.S. economy doing very well and somehow rebuilding its industrial base. In the long term, U.S. influence and wealth will make up a much smaller share of the world’s wealth than it does today.
I do think there will be a recession yes. But within 6 to 18 months, the recession could be over with and growth will come back as the US rebuilds some of its industrial base. US imports and exports will decrease over time.
Note: it is my prediction at 70% (e.g. I think there is 70% that it will happen).
It could be over, but it won't be over, because he can't be trusted, changes position on important issues every night, and this does not create environment welcoming to investors. Nobody sane will commit to longterm investment. No investment, no growth.
> US imports and exports will decrease over time.
So prices will rise and and government expenditures will fall. Where exactly will that growth come from?
I think companies who want to access the large U.S. internal market will have an incentive to have factories in the U.S. That will likely fuel growth. The growth will be coupled with less imports and exports given nationalism and tariffs.
And if it is what the Americans want why not. But as the U.S. take this new direction, let's make sure former allies are treated with respect and given proper notice of the changes so that they can adapt their economies and defense postures.
It usually takes five to ten years to move a factory from one country to another, and it costs an enormous amount of money that mostly will not drive new profit. Costs in the US will be higher also. There is more to consider in moving a factory to the US than market access.
Could work. Or they could just decide to invest elsewhere.
I guess if the economy is in a recession and people spending less it is not the best place to invest. Unless it is for cheap labor but then you'll have problems with export tariffs.
If they invest elsewhere, they will have limited access to the U.S. market—that is Trump’s policy it seems.
If the U.S. has one thing going for it, it’s the strength of its market, characterized by high consumer spending and strong potential for growth. Contrast this with the Japanese consumer market, for instance: in real terms, salaries have not increased over the past 10 years, and consumer spending is below what it was a decade ago. (Note: I love Japan, but this is the reality.) European market is between these extremes I believe. The U.S. market may be significantly more attractive to most companies.
If the high tarriff environment sticks around, including reciprocal tarriffs, the issue is either you produce in the US and have good access to the US and poor access everywhere else, or you produce outside the US and have poor access to the US, and good access to much of everywhere else (depending on things).
The US is a big and important market, and for some things, it would be better to forgo competitiveness in the rest of world market; but for others, rest of world adds up to be more important.
Same line of thinking was used during the Great Depression of 1929, protectionist measures only made everything worse, deepening and extending the recession.
There isnt the slack in the US labor force to rebuild the manufacturing base. Not without significant inflationary pressure. Especially with the hostility towards migaration.
Who will be building, and manning all that newly developed industrial base? You cannot create enough labour in 18 months, it's a very hard fact of reality.
Your labour market has been running at full employment for a while, 4-5% unemployment, there's no leftover hands to help with building up multiple industrial bases. Unless you want massive inflation when all these openings for the rebuilding of USA's industrial base, and need to pay a lot to absorb as much labour as possible to actually happen.
Not even considering in how much risk the investors of this new industrial base will be having to hedge against, who knows when Trump will increase tariffs on their inputs until everything rebuilds internally, financial hedging, oversupplying their warehouses to prepare for shocks, etc. are all quite expensive. Who will pay for it?
I keep expecting him to rally his support base and attempt to overturn the 22nd amendment. Short-term "winning" might be exactly what he needs to rally them.
Yeah, would have been really useful for the US to at least convince China's northern neighbor to constantly do mobilization exercises [1] on their shared border to keep the PLA off-balance and draw combat power away from important theaters. Instead, we've pissed away the Sino-Soviet Split and enabled Eurasia to operate with secure interior lines. This can be chalked up entirely to really arrogant and foolish neocon decision-making with regards to Russia 2003-2007.
Oh, the US are gonna help Taiwan? I would've thought you might think of it as unwinnable too.
Oh, that's why Trump is trying to speed up TSMC to build chips on US soil! Now everything makes sense! Surely, TSMC will just do it! And the Chinese will wait for the transition period to finish before they attack the island!
This is absolutely intended to be sarcastic and demonstrate the absurdity that someone who cuts ties with allies would ever do anything to help the next one. And if that next one is threatened with war, it would ever feel comfortable to effectively destroy their only bargaining chip for assured US military help afterwards.
Man, all I know is this year isn't going to end well. For anyone.
Long term the Taiwan situation absolutely is unwinnable, and their current government is completely dependent on the US when it comes to staying in power. There is a strong pro-unification party ready to take over the moment US support is put on hold. Wonder if we'll see this card played when negotiating with TSMC...
There’s close to zero chance the US would win a war with China in the event that it attacks Taiwan. Either china wins quickly, or it takes out all the assets which make it strategic in any case.
Why would the US or the west or China wants to start a war? Over what? They don't have any disputes about land or people. Just some irritations about whatever. But certainly not recipe for war. Even Taiwan is not a reason for the US to start a real war against China. Proxy war by supporting Taiwan sure. But thats it.
> Totally agree that Trump is trading long-term dominance for short-term gains.
I'd say the other way round - rebuilding everything that was outsourced will take a long time, so hard times are ahead. In the long term, I hope the USA will be less dependent on China.
But at the same time the way it was done completely destroyed the credibility of the USA as a reliable partner, both in trade as well as military relations. Countries will organize new treaties, and the USA will be a powerful player but with far less influence than before.
I think that some engineers will still be needed to maintain old codebases for a while yes.
But it's pretty clear that the codebases of tomorrow will be leaner and mostly implemented by AI, starting with apps (web, mobile,...). It will take more time for scaling backends.
So my bet is that the need for software engineering will follow what happened for stock brokers. The ones with basic to average skills will disappear, automated away (it has already happened in some teams at my last job). Above average engineers will still be employed my comp will eventually go down. And there will be a small class of expert / smartest / most connected engineers will see their comp go up and up.
It is not the future we want but I think it what is most likely to happen.
What makes you think that AI is going to produce leaner codebases? They are trained on human codebases. They are going to end up emulating that human code. It's not hard to imagine some improvement here, but my gut is there just isn't enough good code out there to train a significant shift on this.
Good question and I have no strong answer today. But I think we'll find a way to tune models to achieve this very soon.
I see such a difference between what is built today and codebases from 10 years ago with indirections everywhere, unnecessary complexity,.. I interviewed for a company with a 13yo RoR codebase recently after a few mins looking at the code decided I didn't want to work there.
I thought competition was exactly what business was about and how the capitalist system was functioning and financing itself? I don't condone Musk's actions but I'm not sure how he ends up as a terrorist. That looks like aggressive competition in a line of business. It's not clear how critical infrastructure or public safety would be negatively affected by his actions, therefore not sure what to think of it.
PS: I do believe Musk should be subject to the federal criminal conflict of interest statute given his position in gov.
That said, it may not matter much. Restarting their nuclear program in secret would likely be far more difficult now and would almost certainly be detected. Ideally, a political agreement will soon render the issue moot.
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