Alternative take: Li Ka Shing took advantage of the Trump bullshit to sell off two port operations at the top of the market, right before a global recession. CK Hutchinson’s share price went up by a fifth when this deal got announced; Blackrock is down.

It was like an episode of Veep except more obnoxious.

What plausible stick could the UK (with or without EU) wield against the US? Pull out of NATO or the Five Eyes? That would hurt them way more than it would hurt the US, and Trump knows they’re too rational to let it happen.

I honestly don’t know how to read the situation. Ukraine’s fought terrifically, but their status seems far less sustainable even if you discount the Trump stuff. I don’t put a lot of stock in these claims that Russia is on the verge of imploding due to the stress of the war, any day now. It is possible, but mostly seems like wishful thinking.

External aid changes the situation a bit, but not ultimately that much because no Western power seems willing to directly intervene with troops. Barring that, the overall situation between the two countries feels a bit like what Shelby Foote said about the US Civil War: “the North fought that war with one hand behind its back… If there had been more Southern victories, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other hand out from behind its back.”

I don’t see it happening. Increased military spending, sure, but individual member states will not give up their authority on war and geopolitical matters. Will France or Germany abolish their ministries and delegate it all to von der Leyen? So the structural problem remains.

“European leaders” operate under a permanent disadvantage because they have to agree among themselves to do anything. This leaves them unable to take the initiative geopolitically, and prone to taking whatever’s the path of least resistance lying before them. The US and Russia have concluded that Europe will roll over and accept whatever they are presented with, after some angsty wailing, and unfortunately they are probably right. Not inviting Europe to talks is just a dominance move showing that they know the Europeans can’t do anything about it.

Unfortunately for Europe, this is just the logical end point of their institutional arrangements. In a domain like geopolitics, where there are intelligent players looking for advantage, it is suicidal to turn off your ability to make decisions.

Dylan’s just being deliberately obtuse. Deepseek developed a way to increase training efficiency and backed it up by quoting the training cost in terms of the market price of the GPU time. They didn’t include the cost of the rest of their datacenter, researcher salaries, etc., because why would you include those numbers when evaluating model training efficiency???

The training efficiency improvement passes the sniff test based on the theory in their paper, and people have done back of the envelope calculations that also agree with the outcome. There’s little reason to doubt it. In fact people have made the opposite criticism, that none of Deepseek’s optimizations are individually groundbreaking and all they did is “merely engineering” in terms of putting a dozen or so known optimization ideas together.

Rare earths to begin with. There will be more demands.

Going after US tech is an obvious move. Digital services taxes, etc.

“Via Greenland” makes no sense. The trouble with Canada-Europe trade is that Canada unfortunately lacks a good port on its east coast (certainly nothing comparable to Vancouver in the west). For the foreseeable future, if the trade dispute with the US drags on, Canada’s best bet is to expand its trade with Asia.

They have no armed forces. Panama always assumed that because of the importance of the canal, in case of external aggression the US will step in to defend them. LOL.

There are no permanent alliances in a multipolar world. The EU is realizing the danger of relying on a stronger partner, when said partner stops thinking of the relationship as an alliance as more as subordination.

It’s hard to figure out what other course of action they have at this point. VW’s factories in the rest of the world (including in China) have been propping up their loss-making German operations for years; it’s not sustainable.

Foxconn is betting on exactly that story. They are moving into the OEM market for EVs. The idea is that Foxconn will put together the chassis and batteries, and then the “actual” car companies will slap on everything else and sell the car.

Practically, there’s little to nothing the Europeans can do. They are thoroughly dominated geopolitically and economically by the Americans. From today’s FT: EU reassesses tech probes into Apple, Google and Meta – they are already in the process of rolling over on tech regulation for the benefit of US Big Tech. Likewise, when the US wants Europe to take part in containment against China, Europe will obey even if they are the ones who get hurt (it will be American firms, surprise surprise, that reap the benefits). On a whole range of issues, it’s the same story.

Many European leaders have seen this problem, but none have ever been able to do anything significant about it.

Panama’s leaders would be giant idiots if they didn’t have a “dead man’s switch” in place along those lines.

I feel like Musk doesn’t have much to work with in UK politics. In the US and continental Europe, his pattern has been to find the “barbarians at the gates” and use his resources to help open up the gates. In the UK, the barbarians kinda already sacked the city a while ago with Brexit. There’s not much left that Musk can do to mix things up.

How long will an independent Greenland possibly last if the US intends to swallow it up? All it takes is for the American establishment to whip themselves into a bipartisan frenzy over “national security”, then the population follows like sheep, then it’s game over.

Must be humiliating for the Mexicans to be condescended to like this. Agree to a trade deal with the Americans, stick to the terms of the deal, but now the Americans still aren’t happy. They also want to micromanage what companies can do business in your own country, with your own workers.

Fair enough. I think the “Taliban are moderating” narrative was also helped by the fact that the Taliban were being compared against fricking ISIS.