This strikes me as a failure that would have been avoidable with skilled people in a handful of important gatekeeping roles.

Above, you give a fairly insightful statement: " All he needed to do was to do nothing substantively but switch his jawjaw tune from “The economy is garbage” to “The economy is great thanks to me” and the vibessession would have ended and the media would have been wall to wall with “the genius of Trump” nonsense."

He did *NOT* do that. We agree about that too, right?

So then we're stuck with whether he's stupid and clueless or whether he's actually trying to accomplish something.

Does "stupid and clueless" make more sense to you?

He is indeed assuming that... but I wondered if what he said about China was true.

I mean, if he started stuff off by lying, that'd be a bad start.

So I learned about the Three Red Lines rule.

I learned that China did ban private tutoring (and created a black market).

I learned that China cracked down on luxury influencers as part of a country-wide internet tampdown. (And I'm sure you remember them firewalling off Americans from Chinese folx during the TikTok tempest in the teapot.)

So he has, at least, started from a position of verifiable statements.

Yishan has an interesting take:

Ok, so I am not an administration apologist but I have not heard any intellectually rigorous discussion of the current tariff policy. I'm not sure what I'm about to say is either, but here is a perspective I have not yet seen advanced:

Before we begin, a shift in perspective. To understand where I'm going, you have to first accept that China is succeeding, that they are not backwards, and that in many areas they are already far beyond the US. If you're still in the "China's advantage is low-cost labor" mindset, you're ngmi and might as well leave now.

All right, for everyone still around:

A few years ago, Xi and the CCP made a series of what appeared to be extremely damaging moves for China.

These included:
- popping the real estate bubble, crushing investors and bankrupting more than one investment firm
- wiping out all for-profit student tutoring companies, an entire industry gone overnight
- severely tamping down the entire Chinese social media and e-commerce startup ecosystem

These were widely portrayed as damaging to the Chinese economy and part of an authoritarian reassertion of power and retreat from free markets and capitalism.

Maybe they were.

But, there was rationale behind all of those - and some people even believed them to be true for the US, namely:

- "housing is for living in, not investment" so prices should be low, not high
- for-profit tutoring advantages rich families, corrupting the meritocratic exam system
- social media and e-commerce make money but aren't tech that benefits national security, the way aerospace, robotics, and semiconductors do

A few years later, we see many of the intended results:

- working-class people have been able refinance their homes for less, even while investors took a bath
- the exam system is no longer as corrupted
- China speeds ahead in many hardtech areas

This isn't a post about China supremacy.

(The investment climate in China is still tepid, and China has many other issues)

This is a post about the fact that large-scale decisions that benefit the national interest often look bad according to conventional metrics and will certainly be decried as bad by the people who have been most successful under the current system!

That is likely to be as true in China as in the US, or anywhere.

After all, if they made things look good under the current metrics, we'd already be doing them quite uncontroversially! So anything non-obvious that needs to be done which isn't already being done is probably going to look really bad by those metrics.

I use China to illustrate this because it has leaders who are willing to take such actions, whereas the US generally does not.

Now... I don't personally know if the tariffs are that thing for the US.

But I do know that if they aren't, pointing out that the stock market is tanking is not a useful way to prove it.

US supply chains are global, and I suspect the tariffs are not focused on punishing other countries, but to force US-owned companies to move their supply chains (and thus physical production) into the United States. But it's easier for a President to yell and demonize other countries than to do that about your own country's major industry leaders.

I don't know if there's a better sequence for doing this combined with selected deregulation, but certainly any plan will end up making typical metrics look really bad. I am a fan of detail and finesse myself, and we can't just cold-start new factories in the US tomorrow.

If you just want to know how bad things will be bad, you can probably find a best-case scenario by looking at how long it took for the Chinese economy to recover after they took the drastic actions I listed above.

Sure, but that's all Engineer Level 3 and up kinda stuff.

I'm talking about AI replacing helpers.

I'm not sure that she has a whole lot in common with the other speakers that have been shut down over the last dozen years or so.

Isn't that a requirement for a blacklist? A common theme?

Well, other than the "potentially harmful" thing?

I'm not sure that it's a blacklist as such. It's just another name on the pile.

We used to get Level 3 Engineers from the best and brightest of the Level 2 Engineering pool.

I don't know where we'll get Level 3s after they stop making Level 2s.

Maybe we'll make it so that AI is so good that we'll only need Level 4s. That'll solve that problem.

From your article:

Liu, who said she was already in New York when she received the call, told CTV News that she was told that the slides about Gaza “could be perceived as antisemitic” and that the USAID slides might be perceived as “anti-governmental”.

Hate Speech has never had a place on campus.

Also, New York University is a private school so it can do whatever it wants.

Given what I've seen AI do to coding, I'm expecting AI to do similar to lawyering.

That is: you won't need paralegals or entry-level staff anymore... hell, you won't need junior partners.

Just Level 3 Engineers and up.

Freedom of Speech doesn't mean Freedom of Reach. The doctor can still say whatever she wants, the university just said "you aren't entitled to say it *HERE*".

If it prevents violence, you have to agree that it's the right decision.

Well, driving a rift between Musk and Trump seemed to be the main goal for a few months there.

Starting rumors that Musk is the shadow president wasn't able to do it... but if anything could, something like this will pull it off.

Yeah, looks like the Three Groups of Voters have different takes on him.

1. AUGH I HATE HIM! I HATE HIM! I'M GOING TO VANDALIZE CARS THAT HIS COMPANY MAKES, I HATE HIM SO MUCH!!!
2. Eh. He's annoying but he's given us a handful of Dubs. He *HAS* given us Dubs... right? DOGE is accomplishing stuff, right? Occasionally?
3. He's pretty annoying to the point where I'd vote to have him go away.

See the difference there? 1 gets fired up, not depressed. 2 is tentative but not particularly energized. 3s are turned off entirely.

Did you hear about New York University cancelling Dr. Joanne Liu's speech? Just happened earlier today.

Apparently, it was going to mention some stuff that was going to make some students there uncomfortable.

The Daily Beast reviews Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Michael McKean playing in a new revival of "Glengarry Glen Ross".

I know that we have some theater afficionados here and I think that they'll really enjoy this review. The reviewer finds the crude and harsh language (including slurs) used by the actors to be offputting and he is disturbed by how the audience laughs at the dialog in the play:

In the play, the characters that say these words aren’t cautioned or castigated or proven wrong. Mamet simply has them say them; the response of the audience in 2025—laughing at them merrily saying the words—is its own telling-on-itself.

If you like Mamet, you will *LOVE* this review.

Trumpism but *SMART*?

Is there a market for that?

Musk seems to have flipped from Grey to Red (though who knows how long that will last).

Cass is an old-schooly kind of guy and seems to be the type of Team Red that no longer has a home under the new Stupid Party Paradigm.

A man out of time but 100% comfortable in the party of McCain and Romney.

Team Rust?

This isn't exactly the Grey Tribe (though Musk has overlap with them and Thiel is Grey to the bone).

Gold Tribe?

Welp, they're going for the death penalty for Luigi Mangione.

Sacco and Vanzetti, 2025.

Michael Kotlikoff is trying to do some light damage control: I’m Cornell’s President. We’re Not Afraid of Debate and Dissent.

It's a good essay. I don't know that it will *WORK*, necessarily, but it's probably the best play available.