That's fair.

Indeed. One of the key areas in which AI research has lots of opportunity to advance is in efficiency. In theory, silicon-based intelligence should be both faster and more energy-efficient than neuronal intelligence because our neurons are actually quite slow and not terribly efficient. But the human brain's architecture obviously makes vastly more effective use of the processing power it has, so there's enormous opportunity for improvement in our current silicon analogs.

It will crack me up if after a few years and a few trillion dollars of investment into massive data centers for AI we make a big architectural efficiency breakthrough that makes the technology 3-4 orders of magnitude more efficient and renders all of those big data centers redundant. Perhaps we'll build out huge renewable energy production capacity to support AI and then suddenly find all of that capacity freed up for other purposes. Enormous green energy surpluses could power the carbon recapture needed to truly fix global warming as well as high-volume desalination and water pumping to fix water shortages... and lots more. That is, if AI doesn't kill us all.

I'm not rationalizing anything away, just trying to be accurate. You should try it!

This is a good example. It is absolutely not true that the whole of the judicial branch is corrupt. It's not even true that the whole Supreme Court is corrupt.

"Burden Foreign Countries with Slop"

Joe has always been an amateur programmer. Spreadsheets are functional programming. Joe has been writing complex macros, wrestling databases and refining OLAPs for decades, as Joe built a mini-IT system inside his department, much to the chagrin of the actual IT dept. Now Joe has a powerful clanker to write scads of code.

That's another one of Joe's days that end in "y". Joe doesn't care. Joe's bosses don't care.

Now the company has clankers to wade through the mess Joe made. So that's not the problem is has always been.

That's mostly correct, but IMO it's worth understanding the nuances.

The "ratified by Congress" phrase indicates that you're thinking about the Constitutional treaty approval process, which requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate (no involvement of the House).

But that's not the only type of treaty the US enters into, and in fact it's the least common kind. Another important kind is the "Congressional-executive" treaty, in which the executive negotiates the terms and then takes it to Congress to pass as an ordinary bill: majority vote of both houses plus presidential signature. This makes it federal law exactly the same as if it went through the Senate "advice and consent" process.

The third kind is the "sole-executive" treaty, in which the executive negotiates and enacts the treaty without any congressional participation. This perfectly constitutional as long as the content of the agreement consists of things that the executive branch already has the power to do, either because the required power is granted to the executive branch by the Constitution or because Congress has passed legislation that delegates the necessary power. The most common sort of sole-executive treaty is a "Status Of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) which the president signs with countries that are hosting US military forces. SOFAs are about how the military will act in those other countries and the president, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to issue orders.

In the case of trade agreements, Congress has delegated some trade agreement power to the president, so some trade agreements can be enacted as sole-executive agreements, depending on the content, though it's generally better to make them one of the other kind because what one president can do on his own, another can undo.

As for Trump's trade agreements, if the US side of the agreement is just about tariff rates, and if the president has the authority to set tariffs (a power SCOTUS just reduced but did not take away), then they could conceivably be enacted as sole-executive treaties. What has to happen on the other side varies, of course.

What's really interesting is if the US side of the agreement was to not enact tariffs that SCOTUS just said the president can't enact anyway. In that case, the other countries maybe allowed themselves to be rolled, because SCOTUS ruling does a lot to ensure that the US follows those agreements... but only because the US couldn't have broken them without congressional action anyway.

Time and again, people are learnng the hard way that making deals with Trump is a bad idea. Appearing to make deals with Trump, however, is a great idea. It's particularly effective to promise to do something in the future that you have no intention of doing and which Trump will forget about.

"Flood the zone with shit" is Bannon's phrase (and maybe someone before him), nothing really to do with Project 2025. The strategy is implicit in a lot of their plans, but they don't ever call it out as such.

No, they wouldn't, because that's not how courts work. They do not rule on issues that aren't in front of them, and with few exceptions, they rule as narrowly as possible on the issue that is in front of them. There are really good reasons for them to work this way, so you really want them to, even though it sometimes means that issues that are important to you get dragged out.

Note that I'm not saying this is a sane court, just that even if it were, it wouldn't have done what you want. This also isn't a completely insane court, though. It's a mixed bag that on balance is pretty bad, but not entirely. When faced with an issue that is as ridiculous as Trump's claims that IEEEPA, which isn't about tariffs, lets him set crazy tariffs based on an "emergency" he made up out of whole cloth, they rule 6-3 against him. With a fully sane court it would have been 9-0 with one or two blistering concurring opinions in addition to the restrained and lawyerly majority opinion.

But it still wouldn't address issues not properly before it.

That number is roughly accurate, but misleading.

What they have been doing (and it's bad, and wrong, but not quite as bad or wrong as the number makes you think) is giving him his way on temporary, emergency orders, then finding against him on the merits, as late and as narrowly as possible.

The consistent pattern is:

1. District courts find that he's doing something that's probably wrong and which creates risks of irremediable harm, harm that can't be fixed later when the court makes a final decision on the merits of the case, so the judge issues an injunction ordering the government to stop. The injunction is just a temporary "stop", while the courts decide if it's legal.
2. The government appeals the injunction, and loses. This is actually somewhat weird. Usually the government just obeys the injunction until the issue is decided.
3. The goverment appeals the injunction to the Supreme Court. Then this court does two historically very strange things. First, it actually accepts the appeal. SCOTUS hasn't historically done that, instead deferring those issues to the lower courts. Second, it stays the injunction, and does so with very little explanation, because honestly there isn't any good reason for doing it.
4. When the actual case eventually makes its way to SCOTUS, they agree to hear it, and then drag their feet as long as possible before issuing a ruling.
5. When they eventually rule on the merits Trump loses most of the time. 57% of the time, to be exact. That's mostly in his first term, though. In his second there have been only two cases with final rulings. and his record is 50/50... but that's even kind of misleading because the one he won was a procedural issue. If I were to assign some sort of weighting by subjective importance, I'd say his second term record is 90% loss.

I don't think there's any doubt that the current SCOTUS is ideologically biased and politicized in Trump's favor. There are two justices who, AFAICT, have never ruled against him, even when their history says they should have disagreed on the merits. But still, when the court actually has to write out opinions justifying their decisions -- and setting binding precedent in the process -- they go against him more often than not. Given how weak the administration's argument are in a lot of the cases before the court right now, I expect his overall win rate to plummet.

I use Claude, mostly. Which one is most likely to give me the unvarnished, cold, hard truth?

What else should one expect from all these red states?

I wish. It's still a "people pleaser", just less so.

> "Good enough" is exactly the reason that AI is upending the world of white collar work. It might not replace a skilled and experienced employee, but it's good enough.

I don't necessarily have a problem with that. The problem is, skilled workers only become skilled after being inexperienced for a while and gaining experience. If you cut junior, unskilled workers from the job market, you won't have skilled workers in a few years.

In other words, company that adopt AI to avoid paying unskilled labor are shooting themselves in the foot.

Another solution: Get buses with proper thermal management systems in their batteries. The batteries should be able to warm themselves to the safe charging temperature using stored power, while driving to the charger.

They may actually have that, and it's some bug in the thermal management system that creates the fire risk, or something similar. But if they don't, that's an actual issue that should be looked into: Why did Vermont buy buses without such a critical cold-weather feature? If that's what's going on, there is an issue but it's a governance issue, not an EV issue. It would be like buying diesel buses in North Dakota without block heaters.

"never" and "nirvana" are both excessively strong.

There will undoubtedly be teething issues as we learn how to build EVs for different environments. In this case, it sounds like these busses really need proper battery thermal management systems that are capable of warming the batteries to the required temperature for charging. Done right, that increases charging time only trivially because the batteries should use stored energy to warm themselves on the way to the charging station. My car (Tesla) does this, so it's not like the technology is in any way unusual.

On the other hand there will be some ways in which EVs are forever inferior to ICEVs, just as there are ways in which ICEVs are forever inferior to EVs. In both cases, the solution is to structure the system around the strengths and weaknesses of the technology, and in some cases choosing the otherwise less-desirable technology. "Nirvana" will never be achieved with any tech.