That is a good approach, but Walmart success shows that it's not the only approach. It is also possible to make a load of money by selling everything. (See also: Procter and Gamble).

Steve Jobs chose the right solution for Apple. It's not the right solution for every company, or all the time.

How does Elon make money on the swings?

The "cold war" phrase has been hitting the think tank and media circuits. here is another example

I'm ok with it as long as I don't have to bail it out if it fails.

It's like the hover tank in Sargent Bilko. Not about being practical, just about if you can get the contract. Human nature is the same everywhere.

Tariffs are a bad thing from a pure economic perspective. They introduce inefficiencies, and make things more expensive. This is a basic concept of macroeconomics.

However, some things are more important than making the most money. Among them, national defense. In America, both parties have decided they don't want to work with China anymore, for varying reasons of ideology, ethics, and self defense. And they have decided that is more important to them than economic efficiencies.

It's likely intended for military purposes (or more precisely, an attempt to get funding to build them for military purposes).

C is another static language, so the IDE can give you a good autocomplete without relying on AI. Why haven't you switched to Rust? I hear it's better at everything.

Why do you think that?

Visual Studio and Eclipse are typically used for statically typed languages (C# and Java), so you get IDE magic like automatic refactors, renaming, jump to definition, etc. It's nice, and helps you program faster.

However, in the real world most people use dynamic languages like Python, which loses all that IDE magic (AI can kind of help here). btw IntelliJ has been more popular than Eclipse among Java programmers for more than a decade now.

The conclusion is that most programmers don't care about programming more quickly/efficiently.

I'm now not even sure what your point is. The population decline was reported in multiple places, if you don't like Al Jazeera, then feel free to find a different source.

I assume strong AI is possible at any time, as soon as the algorithm is figured out.

Their property sector bubble popped in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

They haven't recovered and have been going full Baghdad Bob with their GDP numbers in an attempt to hide the problem: https://www.atlanticcouncil.or...

You can't call something a "serious bid for top talent" when you don't even know what the terms are. Applications haven't opened, and the details about eligibility haven't been released. It's premature to make conclusions about what they are trying to do (let along what they will do) without those details.

The Soviet Union never even pretended to be communist. They claimed they were socialist, and working towards communism. But they were quite aware they hadn't achieved it yet.