The company I work for is heavily international - we crossed the 50% mark a few years back, and now a majority of our revenue comes from non-US countries.

Our parent company is almost entirely US-only.

We're hiring a lot world-wide, and a tiny amount domestically. Our parent is laying people off left and right.

We're also postponing domestic projects. International ones are full-steam ahead.

And the single-biggest reason is no exec can make any significant plans without serious risk of the President of the US doing something bone-headed that blows it up. The risk that some admin hanger-on will come up with a regulatory extortion scheme targeting big announcements is too great. Even if you're not directly targeted, they just flip various regulatory switches randomly, just as they've been doing for the past 8 months. Coked up fascists doing policy is just not good for business, yo.

If you think I'm exaggerating, you try finishing a project budget this month. (Hint.) To be clear this is not complaining about the fee - the constant changes that render yesterday's work irrelevant is the problem.

It is really hard to get disbarred.

Varies a bit by state, but unless you're outright stealing from clients, you get a lot of escalating warnings and 2nd chances.

If you're curious how bad you have to behave to actually get disbarred, the shenanigans of one Richard P. Liebowitz may be instructive.

I dunno. China is a "market socialist" system -- which is a contradiction in terms. If China is socialist, then for practical purposes Norway and Sweden have to be even *more* socialist because they have a comprehensive public welfare system which China lacks. And those Nordic countries are rated quite high on global measures of political and personal freedom, and very low on corruption. In general they outperform the US on most of those measures, although the US is better on measures of business deregulation.

Every time I see a story like this, I think about Daniel Suarez's book Daemon.

It isn't a great book - fairly disposable scifi that requires TV-style disbelief-suspension and eventually devolves into weird techno-utopianism. But has great bits of scene-setting mind candy that is frighteningly believable.

Like the fleets of robot cars used as weapons.

You are subsidizing billionaires.

It makes no sense to claim Chinese courts have a lot of power, although it may seem that way â" itâ(TM)s supposed to seem that way. One of the foundational principles of Chinese jurisprudence is party supremacy. Every judge is supervised by a PLC â" party legal committee â" which oversees budgets, discipline and assignments in the judiciary. They consult with the judges in sensitive trials to ensure a politically acceptable outcome.

So it would be more accurate to characterize the courts as an instrument of party power rather than an independent power center.

From time to time Chinese court decisions become politically inconvenient, either through the supervisors in the PLC missing something or through changing circumstances. In those cases there is no formal process for the party to make the courts revisit the decision. Instead the normal procedure is for the inconvenient decision to quietly disappear from the legal databases, as if it never happened. When there is party supremacy, the party can simply rewrite judicial history to its current needs.

An independent judiciary seems like such a minor point; and frankly it is often an impediment to common sense. But without an independent judiciary you canâ(TM)t have rule of law, just rule by law.

Hereâ(TM)s the problem with that scenario: court rulings donâ(TM)t mean much in a state ruled by one party. China has plenty of progressive looking laws that donâ(TM)t get enforced if it is inconvenient to the party. There are emission standards for trucks and cars that should help with their pollution problems, but there are no enforcement mechanisms and officials have no interest in creating any if it would interfere with their economic targets or their private interests.

China is a country of strict rules and lax enforcement, which suits authoritarian rulers very well. It means laws are flouted routinely by virtually everyone, which gives the party leverage. Displease the party, and they have plenty of material to punish you, under color of enforcing laws. It sounds so benign, at least theyâ(TM)re enforcing the law part of the time, right? Wrong. Laws selectively enforced donâ(TM)t serve any public purpose; theyâ(TM)re just instruments of personal power.

Americans often donâ(TM)t seem to understand the difference between rule of law and rule *by* law. Itâ(TM)s ironic because the American Revolution and constitution were historically important in establishing the practicality of rule of law, in which political leaders were not only expected to obey the laws themselves, but had a duty to enforce the law impartially regardless of their personal opinions or interests.

Rule *by* law isnâ(TM)t a Chinese innovation, it was the operating principle for every government before 1789. A government that rules *by* law is only as good as the men wielding power, and since power corrupts, itâ(TM)s never very good for long.

I was pointing to the vacuousness of the claim.

I've already run an LLM natively on my phone. That did "not require a data center at all", and also did not require DS.

I realize that half is the focus of the article, but it misses a huge piece of the perniciousness.

They demand exclusivity with venues.

Which means you either hand over all your booking and ticket sales (for a fee, of course) to them, or not be able to book any Ticketmaster artists. If you haven't considered the question, you may not recognize that artist-choice and ticketing are two of the biggest levers a club owner has to manage their business. Most of the other costs of business are pretty inflexible - about your only other cost-control options are fucking over your workers and watering the beer.

This does a couple things - clubs become more like farmers - they get to soak up all the risk with none of the control. It also gives TM more control over artists - I've seen less info on how TM squeezes them, but don't think that isn't there. If an artist doesn't like their terms, they don't get to play their venues.

And of course they wet their beak at every single touch point along the way.

DeepSeek has proven that it can use far less computing power

I've seen where they've asserted that, where has it been proven?

if DeepSeek' s claims are true,

Ah.

some AI queries may not require a data center at all

And here's how you falsify the claim. When can I expect to see that 200B param model on my phone?

I'd bet money that number has very little to do with the actual accounting.

If I were running the their team, I would absolutely fuck with OAI and other competitors like this. They can't discount it completely - this is still early days, there almost certainly are undiscovered efficiency tricks out there.

But it forces them to spend time and money chasing those based on whatever is in DS's paper. Messes with their OODA loop, if you think about things that way.

When it shoves one of those interstitials at you, you'll see a URL parameter like this: "pipelineType=Chewbacca".

Change the Chewy reference to some other word of your choice.

It breaks the rest of the bullshit.

A substantial amount of the actual work of "journalism" these days is hiding the actual informational payload behind someone's pet bias.

Which sometimes leads to a problem deciding which bias to emphasize, but that's why they're the professionals.

"If you slice up humanity into arbitrarily delineated categories like this, number go down."

"Interesting, which arbitrarily delineated category?"

"Youngins."

"Ah, so they're lazy fuckups, not maltreated but noble boomers."

The US is dropping workplace safety monitoring, particularly for all those miners whom a certain nostalgic segment of people who have never worked in mines like to claim they're looking out for.

The US was doing something. That effort appears dead now.

Instead, states like Florida and Texas are heading the other direction, making it impossible for local government to protect people.

I'm sure your foreman will allow you have water every 2 hours, he's a nice guy, right? Not that like that last jerk.

Sure. The fast-growing reefs take around 100K years to reach their current sizes. Slower ones are, well, slower.

I guess the second-best time to plant them is now?