Unfortunately, some of the convertors for électrification depend on minerals which, if not "rare", are unevenly distributed.
That leave plenty of room for "battery wars", "motor wars", Even "solar panel" wars if we need to.
I do not believe Putin and Trump are eying Dumbass and Groenland only because of the scenery - and the general historical lesson of the 2020s is that brute force _is_ worth it.
China only is self sufficient, as far as I understand it.
Europe could use minerals from its soil, if we accepted mining. But we don't want that either, any more.
(And given what is about to happen to Groenland, it may be a blessing in disguise not to be too resource-rich. Again: pray the Emperor may ignore you.)
Funnily enough, one of the big reasons for Ukraine invasion was to block our gas extraction, it happened right after Shell did a discovery research on the Donbass, and for many years the occupation had been contained precisely to the two regions where Ukraine had some deposits - Donbass and Black Sea. It's only later mental decline caused him to expand the attack.
And vice versa, while there are some rare earths in the Donbass, they are not very convenient to extract. Trump's mining deal was more like throwing a useless toy to a kid throwing a tantrum. It's notable that no one even remembers that "deal" lately.
If it's to get access to the oil reserve, it is bad news for the shale oil industry in the USA : maybe "drill baby drill" is not feasible any more, and the only way to maintain the level of GDP is to get the oil from somewhere else.
Or it's just banking oil to prepare a war with China.
Thank FSM some AI-first is going to create fusion any time soon to power the robots solving climate change.
Don't expect the administration to make any sense on this topic. The same time they were signing executive orders and blabbing about the US oil industry, they were telling OPEC to lower prices. There's no coherency to be had with them. They simply don't understand the world or trivial economics.
I can steelman this into a “everything is about oil today, and minerals tomorrow”.
* Let’s assume the US is going to stabilise Venezuela quickly enough, that the Venezuelan oil will soon flow around, but only to “selected” countries (basically, …. Anyone but China)
* Let’s assume that the US is going to keep the war in Ukraine dragging on (it’s winter anyway), so that Ukraine can continue bombing the Russian oil infrastructure and
Then the outcome would be:
* USA kept happy because cheap oil will flow from Venezuela to USA, which would help keeping gas price down at the pumps, during an election year
* Europe kept obedient, because it’s not guaranteed to be on the list of “selected” countries that will get the cheap oil. Maybe they’ll even strike a “nice” bargain for Groenland, “or else...”
* Ukraine kept busy fighting ; and the “coalition of winning” kept “unable” to put boots on the ground in Ukraine (which they only want to do at the latest possible time, as the first “coalition” soldier to fall will trigger a domino effect leading to either WW3, or humiliation
* Putin kept annoyed, because they can’t sell cheap oil at all without refineries in Venezuela, and with less and less infrastructure in Russia
* China kept annoyed, because they can’t buy cheap oil, or at least not enough to stockpile for a war against USA
* OPEC kept “happy ish”, I guess, because they can hike up prices for whoever is not on the “selected” list of countries approved by Emperor Trump ?
* Eventually, maybe the USA gets the minerals in Ukraine and Groenland, making them double-happy
Of course I’m missing things, this is pure keyboard geopolitics.
But my point is just that I don’t need USA to be completely “crazy” to justify what they’re doing. Just “more willing to take bold risks” then we have been used to. In a sense, that’s what USA voted for in 2024.
> * Let’s assume the US is going to stabilise Venezuela quickly enough, that the Venezuelan oil will soon flow around, but only to “selected” countries (basically, …. Anyone but China)
This is a bad assumption. Trump has already promised China their oil on the first day of this nonsense. You don't need to steelman anything. Incompetence does exist in the real world. There's no more reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Well, If I strawman them now, this assumption fail in a different way: I very much expect the cartels and narcos to organise a guerilla that will disturb oil trade for a while. (Russia would be incentivized to fund / equip / help the cartels. This would backfire, of course, but what doesn't ?)
Case in point : if you had the biggest military in the world, and no one to credibly oppose you, you'd have a lot of arguments to convince everyone that your bank account is actually full.
Lesson 1 of W.Spaniel course on international relationship is that "international order" is the longest running form of anarchy.
Pray you stay on the good side of the Emperor closest to your home.
It's a good thing the current emperor is old - at least we have patience and trusting biology as an option. Successions are often messy, and I don't see Emperor Trump as the kind to cautiously pick his heir.
That is a misunderstanding. The stated and actual purposes of the UN are different. The actual purpose was to give great powers a place to negotiate with each other, so that we wouldn't get a third world war.
That is why the 5 most powerful countries were permanently put on the security council with complete veto powers.
There was a brief period, from the fall of the Soviet Union to Bush's invasion of Iraq, where "rules-based international order" was not a joke, and in fact was taken pretty seriously by quite a lot of people.
Democracy, free trade, free speech and freedom of religion had "won" over the soviet union. International treaties were reducing stockpiles of nuclear and chemical weapons. The WTO had just started resolving trade disputes through negotiation rather than trade wars. International peacekeeping forces were preventing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, even though there wasn't anything like oil motivating the peacekeeping forces. Planners of the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda were being prosecuted by an international war crimes tribunal.
Then-UK-Prime-Minister Tony Blair believed in this stuff pretty earnestly - in fact he wanted to get a UN resolution authorising the Iraq invasion so badly he was happy to submit fabricated WMD evidence to get it.
Of course, even at the height of the "rules-based international order" there were always some stark inconsistencies - especially in the middle east, for example.
You imagine wrong. It was a point that I first remember seeing from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Dyer. Who is not from the US, but is an expert on the subject.
It was in his documentary series War, but I don't remember which episode.
That's not going to play well with DJT's bid for Nobel Peace Prize. Although I guess invading Sweden would be a solution, and there are probably plenty of reasons to invade Sweden - they must be looking badly at Russia, or he can mix it up with Groenland, or something.
That being said, how many continents are we left from being able to call that a bona fide world war ? Can we count Africa as "in a state of war per default", leaving only Oceania ? Should Australians brace themselves ?
To be fair, the existence of Surströmming [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surstr%C3%B6mming] is a valid casus belli. We aren't talking about food here - it's "haloanaerobic bacteria producing hydrogen sulfide in a pressurized vessel". An unregulated bio-weapons program hiding in plain sight.
Australians are currently paying him billions for 2nd hand nuclear submarines (which are not likely to ever be delivered), so that they can protect themselves from their biggest trading partner.
Australia is more dependant on Chinese trade than the reverse. If something untoward happens and China's relationship with Australia changes, it is prudent for Australia to have long range submarines.
The deal is admittedly shakey, but so is most things the US is involved in these days.
So, Australia has a trade déficit with China ? Surely Trump is going to invade Australia to put tarifs between New-Zealand and "Newer-Zealand", as Emperor Trump is soon planed to rename Australia.
A trading partner that has absolutely nothing to gain from ever setting foot on the Australian continent, and has never expressed or even implied the slightest intention to do so.
But hey, if making up a bogus threat is what it takes to sell guns…
The land border between Sweden and Norway is what everyone is aware of and expects to be invaded via. It is at the border between Norway and Finland no one would expect a little special operation.
Just because DJT has limited subtlety, doesn't mean he has zero subtlety. The ambassador to Sweden will tell the members of the committee, one by one in a way where they can't confer with each other, to accept the bribes or "else". It's not like it would be the first inducement to the committee in recent years, so they are likely to go along with it.
Why is it so popular to make up ridiculous fantasy stories about bad things that people/organizations you don't like might do? There's plenty of real stories you can refer to. It's almost as if you want your enemies to do more bad things to justify your hate.
Now you're confounding 'humor' with 'quality humor'. The first one only needs that the intent of the sentence is tongue-in-cheek and not meant to be taken literally; which the OP clearly was, and the first reply clearly missed.
Would he be as equally justified to correct the names of Greenland and Iceland (by swapping their names) as he was justified to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America?
I actually believe the majority of children who need to study geography would prefer Greenland (which has a lot of ice) to be called Iceland, and Iceland (which doesn't have a lot of ice) to be called Greenland.
I think a majority consensus would be easily achieved.
Language is defined by how people use it, not decreed top down. It would just be convenient if the very apogee of power (despite the deep state) concurred with and recognized the wisdom of the least represented in the world: children.
The "let's pick people at random to discuss hairy topics" has been done at least three times in France in the form of "Convention Citoyenne".
In each case, people came up with relatively "popular" solutions (one of them is still in progress)
In each case, the elected officials all but ignored the output, on the ground that the body had not been elected, was manipulated by experts, had no responsibility and accountability, etc...
Anyone who solves this will indeed have found an improvement over elective democracy.
In the case of the US, a lower hanging fruit would be getting out of "elections that can easily be bought by corporations with litteral money".
Yep, people in this thread are claiming that this doesn’t work.
In fact, it does work, and it is already implemented! Here in Germany we also have the concept of „Bürgerräte“, and we have similar problems as in France (no political power to implement their solutions).
However, one takeaway was that people vastly underestimated how carefully the participants would try to understand the topic at hand. People that would usually just regurgitate angry propaganda were forced to form their own opinion and they did!
IMHO it’s this is a great tool for democracy that is yet underused.
But how useful is it as a tool if nothing is implemented in the end ?
What's worst is that, at least in France, there was an elegant solution to the problem : just ask the general population to approve or reject the proposals in a referendum. Even if the referendum was consultative, and even if the lawmakers were to make the law in the end, it would have massively made it harder to ignore the result.
And I would have loved to see the "popular jury" campaign for or against the measures.
> Despite a production capacity of 250,000 units per year at Giga Texas, the Cybertruck is currently selling at a run rate of roughly 20,000 to 25,000 units annually.
How can such an overcapacity be possible ? Is that a massive failure of market analysis ?
On the other hand, is the factory building the cybertruck easy to modify to build other, most successful models ? I hear there is demand for billions of autonomous robotaxis.
Let's emulate world class leadership from the greatest country on earth, and immediately stop funding those alarmists doomsayers.
Anyway, I read on HN that AI was about to solve climate change any time now. I'm sure prompting LLMs the right way will harness the world knowledge to generatively hallucinate a way for trees to grow better.
We can't afford scientist in Europe anymore, we have pensions to pay.
I suppose China does not need american scientist to work in China. They just need to make sure they can't work in the US. Which they are doing.
The only "funny" outcome is that they manage to fund a startup that develops tools to alleviate climate change, and explicitly reserve them to countries and states that believed in climate change in the first place.
But that would be mean. So, of course Florida can have it. It will just be slightly expensive for them.
I started the year with "Right thing, right now", and I'm ending it with "wisdom takes work" (R.Holiday), but I'm happy to say that I'm now a bit "tired" of re-reading the same rehashing of other people's book, and I want to read the original ones. Which, actually, is the pont.
I wanted to read classics, and devoured "The portrait of Dorian Gray" (O.Wilde), where maybe 50% of all the "as O.Wilde said..." quotes seem to come from (uttered by a single, incredibly obnoxious character.)
I challenged myself to read "Les Miserables" (V.Hugo), and actually managed to get two tomes out of five down. Eminently quotable, heavily skippable - why on earth spend half a time on describing the ins and out of Waterloo, except to show off ? - and, surprisingly, at times, _funny_.
The bio of Pierre Mendès France (J.Lacouture) was very much topical, given the mess in Franch politics. We had more PMs in one year than in a few chapters of the book. It's very weird to read that, at some point, some politicians were "liked" by the people - but lost power anyway.
A small Edouard Phillipe book called "Men who read" almost made me like the guy - his next book is more serious and expected. It pains me to think that our next election is going to be about "well read people who disappointed everyone" vs "popular jocks with no education who will end up disappointing everyone".
"Abundance" (E.Klein / D.Thompson) is an attempt from "well read people" to at least try and understand why everyone is disappointed and prefer the jocks. I don't think they included any solution in their book, though - maybe they save it for the sequel, or for E.Klein's presidential bid.
I want to read all Stripe press - if only, because the covers rock, and they're optimistic. Started with "Poor Charlie's Almanach" (C.Munger), which a disappointing rehash of the same funny speech seven times. (Tldr : be multidisciplinary, study cognitive biases, don't trade). In the middle of "The Origins of Efficiency " (Potter)
"The Wave" (Souleymane) was not optimistic. And not practical at all - sure, AI enabled drones carrying bioweapons will suck. "The Age of predators" (G. Da Empoli) reminds us that the AI enabled bioweapons carrying drones will come from an illiberal state enabled by billionaires from Silicon Valley, and Russian trolls. I wish someone told me where to go to avoid being targeted too early.
"Everything is tuberculosis" (J. Greene) reminded me of a time when scientists were trying to solve problems as opposed to creating brand new ones - but at least the next generations won't die of boredom.
"We, programmers" is a rehash of Uncle Bob's pre talks "history of programming". I loved the long and detailed parts about G.Hopper. He ends with a (failed) attempt to convince that programmers will still be needed in the age of AI.
Steve Yegge's "Vibe coding" goes full "resistance is futile" about programming with agents, and, interestingly, ends up talking more about TDD than Uncle Bob - but the words "electricity consumption" and "climate impact" are not utured, because, why spoil the fun.
"The Common LISP cookbook" tried to explain me the difference between ASDF, quicklisp and whatnot - 2025 was the closest year I ever go to actually writing something in LISP instead of reading books about it.
And also, "The baby is a mammal" (M.Odent) and "Becoming a dad for dummies", because this year was probably the last one we're I'll get so much time to read :)
I think he has said this in some stream and the majority of the time was spent on the game. He also said many times that the game is way more difficult to make than the compiler.
Rust was created on a Mozilla payroll to provide a C++ alternative with better concurrency support for the purpose of browser engine rewrite. Also, Rust doesn't have a 'creator', the person tasked with leading the project didn't have the authority to make the decisions, see https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html
If I remember correctly, the game was just a showcase to test the new language.
Afaik that's exactly why it's a sokoban clone, because he didn't want to spend time inventing new mechanics.
Sorry, but no. Just because the graphics have some cartoony stylization does not mean that a lot of thought and effort did not go into them, not to mention lots of work from artists. You absolutely could not recreate something that looks like that with python in a few weeks. Not that the language/engine was strictly necessary to do so either, but you’re way off-base in terms of the level of work and effort required for these things.
That leave plenty of room for "battery wars", "motor wars", Even "solar panel" wars if we need to.
I do not believe Putin and Trump are eying Dumbass and Groenland only because of the scenery - and the general historical lesson of the 2020s is that brute force _is_ worth it.
China only is self sufficient, as far as I understand it.
Europe could use minerals from its soil, if we accepted mining. But we don't want that either, any more. (And given what is about to happen to Groenland, it may be a blessing in disguise not to be too resource-rich. Again: pray the Emperor may ignore you.)
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