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I mean, Goldman Sachs is publicly-traded, and you can short them. That will – by a tiny amount – decrease the amount of the company. Unless you’re throwing around huge amounts of money, they won’t notice, though, and I’d call the whole process of activist investment generally not very sensible, as in an efficient market, capital from other investors should flow into the hole you’ve created and pull the value of the company back up. I’ve heard the process of activist investing described as “trying to bail a hole in a lake”. I don’t think that that’s a good way to express disagreement with the CEO of the company, and would consider doing so to be an unwise decision in terms of your own finances.

I’ve seen a lot of moves by people on various communities here who are upset over one aspect or another of the Trump administration talking about or encouraging things that I’m pretty sure aren’t going to do much to stop them. This includes:

• Not buying any products from anyone for one day.

• Highlighting some vehicles being burned at a Tesla dealership in France.

• Highlighting a row of Tesla superchargers being burned in Massachusetts.

• Spamming a DOGE email address.

Some of those can potentially be personally-costly, like giving someone jail time, but I don’t think that anything on there will likely stop Trump or Musk from doing things or reverse what they’re doing.

I’m gonna repeat the last comment I made on the topic: if someone — assuming that they’re in the US — legitimately wants to stop the stuff the Trump administration is doing, the most-direct route is probably for the Democrats to flip the House in the midterms. It’s likely that they will cheerfully disrupt a lot of this, to the extent that they can. Right now, the GOP holds a trifecta, and Congressional Republicans are very likely to be very hesitant to do anything that starts a fight with the President and might threaten their legislative agenda, even people like Lisa Murkowski, who has been pretty vocally upset with Trump. The Democrats, on the other hand, have every incentive to do so. I’d go link up with the Democratic Party – I know that they take volunteers, though I’ve never done so myself – and ask what someone can volunteer to do to flip the House in the midterms. That’s nearly 23 months from now, which is a while, but that’s the biggest hammer readily available.

kagis

They do have this “volunteer” page, including with some checkboxes as to what one wants to volunteer to help do. I don’t see specifically “flip the House in the midterms”, but some similar-sounding stuff is in there, and I’m sure that if someone gets in touch with them and talks to a human trying to organize volunteers, they can probably hook someone up with whatever is going on there.

“I’m spending a lot of time talking to CEOs who are really trying to understand the consequence of some of this,” said Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon at conference in Australia.

“Until there’s more certainty, we have a little bit more runway time. I think we’re going to live with a slightly higher level of volatility. But I think he (Trump) has a purposeful direction that he’s pursuing, and we should take him at his word that he’s going to pursue that direction.”

I mean, I think that there’s an extremely straightforward purposeful direction. He campaigned on tariffs. He appeals principally to a group of people who want protectionist trade policy. Those people are in swing states and don’t like trade with Canada and Mexico. He’s worked hard to give the impression that he’s adopted protectionist policy in the past. Why would he stop?

I don’t think that there needs to be some kind of more-complicated plan. You’ve already got a plan on the table in front of you. The only degree of complication is that Trump’s tended to aim to give the impression that he’s adopting considerably more-protectionist trade policy than he actually is.

“Trump will shout about some tariffs, row back from those announcements, the White House will say something totally contradictory and then Trump might post the opposite on Truth Social 10 minutes later,” the trader said. “You can’t trade that.”

If you can figure out a reasonably-reliable analytical way to determine when Trump is bullshitting, you might.

I would also be interested in such a system.

I mean, it was going to happen at some point, just a matter of China scaling up.

It was a testing year for Airbus’ defense and space division. While its order intake was a record 16.7 billion euros, it reported a loss of 566 million euros — largely due to a 1.3 billion euro charge on its space programs.

looks blank

I didn’t even realize that Airbus did space.

I thought that the big domestic player in European space was Ariane.

goes hunting

Ahhh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArianeGroup

Owners

• Airbus (50%)
• Safran (50%)

Ariane is half-owned by Airbus.

Sounds like they’re going for taking a lighter hand on regulation.

Hmm. You know, I’ve never really thought much about antitrust law in the UK.

I normally think of antitrust in the context of the US. You have a big market there. While the US does have FTAs with some other countries, it doesn’t presently with anyone with a domestic market nearly as large as the US’s is.

But…that’s not the situation with the UK. Post-Brexit, the UK isn’t in the EU. It’s got a market linked to the EU’s, due to the TCA and geographic proximity, but it doesn’t have regulatory authority over what goes on in the EU the way it did when in the EU’s.

The UK’s domestic economy isn’t tiny, but it’s definitely smaller than the EU’s is; about a fifth the size.

My guess is that that means that UK antitrust regulators have less ability to influence what those companies that it interacts with do, because ultimately, being too-restrictive – which affects a company’s dealings in the EU, and could make it less-competitive in the EU, where the costs of any constraint imposed by regulation are most-likely higher due to greater scale – might mean that a company would just choose to do business in the EU but not the UK; they’d always have to weigh that with every antitrust restriction that the UK imposes. Like, say Company A and Company B both do business in the EU and UK and want to merge. EU antitrust regulators are okay with it, but UK antitrust regulators are not. The EU’s economy is about five times that of the UK’s, so the inability to merge is likely going to impact them something like to five times as much in the EU market to the degree that it would in the UK. If they think that the benefit that comes from merging is more than the loss of business in the UK, they might choose to exit the UK rather than comply with the UK antitrust regulation.

In turn, you would expect the UK’s antitrust regulators to aim not to place sufficiently-restrictive requirements such that that occurs, because that’d usually be counterproductive to obtaining a competitive market in the UK.

So I’d kind of think that the post-Brexit UK would be more-inclined to take a lighter hand on antitrust regulation than it did prior to Brexit.

I guess maybe things might work the same way in, say, Canada with the US. I don’t think I can recall Canadian antitrust regulators clamping down hard on a company doing business in both the US and Canada – it’s usually US antitrust regulators taking issue with something. I’ve certainly read more about EU antitrust activity affecting US companies I use than Canadian, though I’d guess that there are more multinationals that I run into that operate in the Canadian market than the EU market.

Hm.

I guess that’d apply to something like mergers. But I guess maybe there are other forms of antitrust regulation where that wouldn’t come up, like restrictions on how a company with a dominant market share might link products together, and there maybe it wouldn’t apply – you could independently and separately follow different regulatory systems in the UK and EU. A company wouldn’t be faced with a “follow UK regulation and be impacted in the EU market” choice then – it could follow EU rules in the EU and UK rules in the UK. So maybe Brexit will change the sort of antitrust regulation that happens in the UK, too – it might still do a lot of “Google is a dominant search provider, so it cannot also link search results to its own mapping services” or something, but not say “Company X cannot purchase Company Y”.

Uh huh. So now that we’re not being terribly-exploited by Ukraine any more and Trump can announce that he has brilliantly cut a deal which will, no doubt, make America great again, are we ramping supply of military hardware back up?

For fuck’s sake.

It would make the most sense to move the body to a flight attendant seat and have an attendant sit with the passengers.

I think that the flight attendants have those dedicated seats at the ends of the cabin and facing it for a reason, so that they can see what’s going on in the cabin. Like, probably safety reasons for that.

Honestly, I’d just as soon not have a corpse next to me…but I’d also just as soon not have a living person next to me. I don’t see it as the world’s most traumatic experience. I mean, I don’t know whether it’s optimal or not, but it’s an airplane, sticking it there isn’t a wildly-unreasonable thing to do. I can’t see getting that worked up over it, as a passenger.

On the flip side, I also don’t think that it’s wildly-unreasonable for the airline to give them a voucher. I mean, it’s not like “dead body on an aircraft” is a common occurrence and it probably doesn’t cost very much to keep someone happy. I mean, I’ve gotten vouchers for being willing to take a later flight when I didn’t have any schedule to keep.

The whole thing just doesn’t seem like enough of an issue to get that worked up about or play hardball over.

Intentional or not is irrelevant.

Unintentional damage still creates problems, sure. But there are ways to mitigate unintentional damage (e.g. trying to revise ship systems to better warn about a dropped anchor or rules on where to anchor), having it be protocol for shore stations to warn ships with AIS that they’re stopped near cable lines, or clustering cables tightly together and focusing on getting people to not anchor right there that don’t work for intentional damage. Maybe push for minimal international standards on crew training — you maybe can’t ban ships from sailing in international waters, but you can restrict who docks at your ports and can agree with other countries to impose similar requirements.

If your risks are intentional cuts, then you have to deal with a lot of other difficult issues, like “what happens if the state just falls back to using something like underwater drones instead of freighters”. And there are approaches that work for intentional cuts that don’t work for unintentional cuts, like deterring a country by threatening it with serious counteraction if it attacks submarine infrastructure.

So if you’re trying to deal with the problem, you are going to care whether you need to worry about peacetime intentional damage or just unintentional damage. Now, okay, you do still have to be aware that a country could go out and cut cables in a war. Intentional damage is always going to be something to keep in mind. But whether-or-not day-to-day intentional damage is occurring should impact how one responds to peacetime cuts.

You can drag an anchor when you’re trying to stay still and the anchor just isn’t, well, anchored; my understanding is that bad weather can cause that.

But some of the above incidents I listed are ships that have their anchor released and are just continuing to sail along while apparently unaware of the fact that they’re hauling an anchor right through the submarine cables that they cross. Like, they aren’t victims of bad weather+bad luck. They’re just screwing up.

At least some of these are accidental, because ships have damaged cables for a long time. Europe’s stopped several ships that have caused damage, had physical access to the ship, and I have yet to heard of one where law enforcement actually wound up saying “we conclude that this was an intentional cut”.

There have definitely been cases where important people have said that they believe that cuts are intentional, but those were not speaking of situations where their investigators had actually come to that conclusion after looking at the ship in a specific incident and asking questions of the crew:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/20/world/accident-or-sabotage-undersea-cables-intl/index.html

European leaders were quick to voice their suspicions. Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said that “nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed.”

The foreign ministers of Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were “deeply concerned” about the incident and raised the possibility that it was part of a “hybrid warfare,” specifically mentioning Russia in their statement.

Their assessment was not plucked out of thin air. Russia has been accused of waging a hybrid war against Europe after a string of suspicious incidents, arson attacks, explosions and other acts of sabotage across multiple European countries were traced back to Moscow.

And the disruption to the cables came just weeks after the US warned that Moscow was likely to target critical undersea infrastructure. This followed months of suspicious movements of Russian vessels in European waters and the significant beefing up of a dedicated Russian secretive marine unit tasked with surveying the seabed.

But two US officials familiar with the initial assessment of the incident told CNN on Tuesday the damage was not believed to be deliberate activity by Russia or any other nation.

Instead, the two officials told CNN they believed it likely caused by an anchor drag from a passing vessel. Such accidents have happened in the past, although not in a quick succession like the two on Sunday and Monday.

The Kremlin on Wednesday rejected the “laughable” suggestions that it was involved, saying it was “absurd to keep blaming Russia for anything without any grounds.”

I can’t find much by way of a graph of submarine cable severing frequency by year, but this (which only shows older years) at least does illustrate that this isn’t a new phenomenon:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Summary-of-the-causes-of-submarine-cable-faults-attributed-to-external-aggression-as_fig1_224378640

https://iscpc.org/publications/icpc-viewpoints/damage-to-submarine-cables-from-dragged-anchors/

Damage to submarine cables from dragged anchors account for approximately 30% of incidents each year representing around 60 faults. Damage to these cables is costly, with telecommunication repairs averaging £500k-£1m per incident and power cable repair costs reported to be in the region of £10m-£100m per incident depending on many variables. Downtime from cable damage has the potential to cause disruption to global communications and energy transmission and distribution.

• One of the most significant anchor drag events in recent history occurred off Sicily in 2008, where a ship dragged its anchor for 300 km, damaging six submarine cables. Such incidents can disrupt multiple cables in proximity, magnifying the impact of an event2 [?].
• Another example is the incident between the Channel Islands and Cornwall, UK where a vessel deployed anchor in poor weather, causing damage to several telecommunications cables3 .
• There was another incident on 17 March 2016 where a vessel dragged its anchor causing damage to telecommunications cables and a power cable, which cut off the electricity supply to the Isles of Scilly4 for a significant period of time.
• The Chilean flag container ship Aconcagua cut three of the then 4 cables linking the United States to Europe in 2002 while sailing from Philadelphia to New York City. The captain erroneously attributed the reduction in the ship’s speed during a gale to the wind when in fact it was the ship’s anchor dragging. Investigation revealed that the anchor windlass had only been secured with the brake and the chain stopper had not been used.
• The Liberian flagged vessel Blue Princess damaged three submarine cables in the Red Sea in 2012. Over a period of 12 hours on 17th February 2012, SEA-ME-WE 3, EASSy, and EIG, causing multiple cable faults. The vessel could be tracked using AIS as crossing the cables at a similar time as faults were reported and appeared to become fastened to the cable with the speed reducing to zero at the time of the final fault during that period.

This is not in any way to discount the possibility that a state could intentionally attack submarine cable infrastructure, which is vulnerable. In the past, cutting cables has been a feature of wartime activity. We have linked Russian intelligence to a set of arson attacks in Europe, so it’s not as if there isn’t a willingness to cause damage. But (a) ships do regularly cause damage to submarine cables and (b) there hasn’t yet been a smoking gun indicating that an investigated cut that has occurred has been intentional.

I get an incredulous “how do you manage to haul your ship’s anchor for hundreds of kilometers and through a number of submarine cables without noticing? What kind of captain are you?” But…people have managed to do so in the past.

I would be surprised if this sort of thing was possible and I’m pretty sure it’s not and im pretty sure it’s a good thing that it’s not

It isn’t in the US, but the US is not all countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroyim_v._Rusk

Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled that citizens of the United States may not be deprived of their citizenship involuntarily.[1][2][3] The U.S. government had attempted to revoke the citizenship of Beys Afroyim, a man born in Poland, because he had cast a vote in an Israeli election after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. The Supreme Court decided that Afroyim’s right to retain his citizenship was guaranteed by the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In so doing, the Court struck down a federal law mandating loss of U.S. citizenship for voting in a foreign election—thereby overruling one of its own precedents, Perez v. Brownell (1958), in which it had upheld loss of citizenship under similar circumstances less than a decade earlier.

EDIT: I haven’t previously read up on citizenship law for Canada, so I don’t know if this is missing relevant Canadian citizenship law, but a quick search suggests that Canadian law doesn’t permit for executive removal of citizenship either:

https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-29/page-3.html

Loss of Citizenship

Marginal note:No loss except as provided

7 A person who is a citizen shall not cease to be a citizen except in accordance with this Part or regulations made under paragraph 27(1)(j.1).

None of that section nor paragraph 27 looks like it provides for involuntary removal of Canadian citizenship.

That being said, there is a question of whether this is ordinary federal law or constitutional law. I don’t know how one determines that.

In the US, Afroyim v. Rusk found that the US Constitution disallowed removal of citizenship. There is a high bar to modify the US Constitution – a majority of both legislatures in a three-quarters supermajority of state legislatures need to approve of a constitutional amendment. This is considerably higher than the bar to pass ordinary federal law, which is just a simple majority in the House, Senate, and the President, or a two-thirds supermajority in both the House and Senate.

Canada’s constitutional situation is complicated. Canada started out following the UK model, where Parliament can change any law it wants to as easily as any other – there is no “higher law” like a constitution. At the time that Canada got split off from the UK at a constitutional level, some of Canadian law was decided to be part of the constitution and some not…but it was never defined exactly what law was and what wasn’t, so I understand that courts have been working that out ever since. The constitution isn’t simply a separate document, as in the US.

Also, different parts of Canada’s constitution have different bars for amendment.

So I don’t know for sure how strong this constraint is; it might be that the Canadian legislature could remove this bar as readily as they would a typical law.

EDIT2: Someone else pointed out the Shamima Begum case below, where the British executive removed someone’s citizenship. I followed that and commented on it when it happened, and it is definitely possible for the executive to strip a citizen’s citizenship in the UK; the law explicitly provides for it.

I was fairly concerned about this at the time it was in the news, because most other legal rights depend on citizenship. If you can remove someone’s citizenship, you can remove most of their other legal rights and protections.

• I thought I read somewhere that vertical tails aren’t very good from a stealth design standpoint. I would imagine that something similar would apply to gargantuan circular saws.

• Landing that thing has got to be a bitch.

• I have some supply-chain security questions regarding the “Made in China” label on the blade.

The direct effects on the world of a nuclear war between the US and Russia isn’t going to include killing 90% of the world’s population.

https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Winter

Even using the most conservative numbers here, an all-out exchange between the US and Russia would produce a nuclear winter that would at most resemble the one that Robock and Toon predict for a regional nuclear conflict, although it would likely end much sooner given empirical data about stratospheric soot lifetimes. Some of the errors are long-running, most notably assumptions about the amount of soot that will persist in the atmosphere, while others seem to have crept in more recently, contributing to a strange stability of their soot estimates in the face of cuts to the nuclear arsenal. All of this suggests that their work is driven more by an anti-nuclear agenda than the highest standards of science. While a large nuclear war would undoubtedly have some climatic impact, all available data suggests it would be dwarfed by the direct (and very bad) impacts of the nuclear war itself.

Russia can’t defeat the US in conventional warfare, but is much-more-comparable from a nuclear aspect. So Russia has a significant incentive to use nuclear weapons.

I’d guess that the US probably has a shot at actually getting a first strike off versus Russia. So the US has a significant incentive to use nuclear weapons.

Anyone intending to make serious use of nuclear weapons has very little reason to hold back if they expect a high likelihood of the other side responding massively. So they’ve got a significant incentive to go all-in.

I think that there’s a pretty good probability that a major war between Russia and the US of the “only one of us is walking away from this” sort goes very nuclear very quickly.

I kind of assume that this sort of thing is to soak up media bandwidth while the mass federal layoffs are happening.

https://archive.is/41nPo

A part of Trump’s politicking has been lying to the public. I’m not sure that you want to do that, whatever freedom it might provide as to policy enactment. I think that that’s pretty corrosive to government credibility. Hard to build credibility, easy to damage it, and it’s a useful thing to have.