I don’t know how URLs are chosen. Maybe it was just sloppiness, AI, or poor English?
I saw a headline today on Google News, something like “Secret Service Shoots Dead Man Who Breached Mara-Lago.” 🙂

55m An old insight from Every asks “Star Wars versus Star Trek?” Are we going towards to Star Wars future? Fraught with conflict and wars. Or a prosperous, exploring, high human potential Star Trek future, with AI and general purpose robots?

— TJ Olsen

The Star Trek future (at least before Gene Roddenberry got a bad case of the lefty daydreamy) had its share of wars, too.

Of the two futures outlined, which is more likely? The Star Wars one, because that’s human nature. If and when we expand out into the Solar System and the Galaxy (assuming FTL turns out to be possible after all), war and conflict and all the other ills of Man will go with us because that’s what human beings do. There’s no escape from the Fall of Man. We may also have the good stuff too, though I would argue that AGI is not desirable at all, but we won’t evade the bad. We can minimize it, but that’s all we can do.

“Article I of the Constitution says that duties and taxes can be imposed only by Congress, and Congress can delegate that authority to the president,” Dershowitz said. “But if you argue that tariffs can be a weapon of foreign policy, a weapon of diplomacy, a weapon of preventing war, then it’s an Article II power of the president, and Congress has no power to limit it.”

— crasey

Yeah, but there’s a huge kicker in that. Generally, the Constitution puts Congress in primary charge of money issues and trade policy (which is why the whole unconstitutional farce of ‘trade promotion authority’ exists). That interpretation of Article II would give the President a de facto power to step in and take over a big chunk of that at will.

Even I would hesitate to ascribe unilateral, unlimited Article II powers over tariffs to the President, if I were a SCOTUS justice. I can even see some reason in some of the SCOTUS’ recent ruling about the tariffs under IEEPA. It really is a very sloppily written law, as a GOP Congressmen pointed out a day or two ago.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15582455/secret-service-mar-lago-man-shot-killed-trump.html

Energy is what it’s all about and the raw materials that feed into the energy complex. But that is going to be inflationary and regrettably that is going to be Star Wars for a long time before we manage to get to a Star Trek era where suddenly there’s just so much energy that we can stop worrying about who’s got energy and who hasn’t.

Why is it inflationary? One of Trump’s goals is to reduce global oil prices from $60-65 to $50. How could that be done? By increasing oil production. We’re pretty much at maximum production, but there are two sources that could affect oil prices– Venezuela and Iran (and Russia, but that’s a separate issue). Both have large supplies which right now are being choked by sanctions– which benefits China since they buy that oil at a discount. What if we could take the sanctions off and both countries increase production. This will affect global oil prices and China will now have to pay more for the oil from these two countries.

If anything that will be deflationary.

He’s agrees that the US needs to re-industrialize. He said:

So what kind of industrialization do we need most? Military. Why do we need that to maintain global supremacy?

Well, in a in a raw sense, yes, hard power. But it’s far more complex than that. Um, what you often find is nobody wants to go to war. And I don’t believe this White House does either. They’re talking about peace through strength. But if you don’t have that strength, you usually don’t have that peace. That’s the historical reality. You need to have a strong civilian manufacturing sector that’s complex as I said, and that has clusters of interrelated industries. So you aren’t relying on one widget coming from one other country without which everything falls apart. We all accept that now. But then if you do find yourself in a conflict as the US did in World War II for example, you can convert that across in an emergency and say okay now we can produce XYZ instead of ABC and we have that there as a backup. If you don’t make anything and you say the services economy is the future which generations of American politicians did, you have absolutely no fallback option. And when what you’ve got in stock in terms of missiles, ammunitions, F-35s, aircraft carriers get blown up or used up, that’s it. Game over. You’re out of the game. So from a resilience perspective, a security perspective, a hegemon perspective, if you want to be, you know, uh, blunt about it, too. This is the only way to go other than to basically go out with a big bang or to fade away.

I’m not sure why it’s an either or question– financialization or industrialization. Why can’t it be both.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten, but it appears he understands what Trump’s approach is.

As to your comment about Musk’s space data centers, Starlink has made 144,000 object avoidance maneuvers last year. This isn’t just space debris. In fact SpaceX is developing their own system to track space objects that will give them better real time data to do those types of maneuvers.

I thought of that myself, but with the suspicion that the court opinion was aimed at defusing that very interpretation. That is, the majority of the court wanted to limit his power and took it off the table. Which is not to say that it won’t be argued in a future case. I expect more suites as this goes forward.

The laser dot lingers, and having lingered, moves on …

One needs to use the right tool when distracting cats. I figure the alternatives were prepared long ago. What next? I don’t know. But I would be surprised if preparations were not already being discussed. Trump has got the smartest presidential team I’ve seen in my lifetime. Some presidents may have been smarter, but none have made better cabinet picks.

That said, things will be different in six months. Perhaps what we see are shaping operations.

Thus, as a teaser to induce your listen until the end (61m) from the last one at 39m, let me outline the 22m payoffs!

As Mr Spock says without irony, “Fascinating.” Truly. And powerful, I must add.

41m Trump’s Tariff-style regime is in America’s DNA. It’s the 19th century, pre-World War II model of international trade descended from the Founder, Hamilton. But the incentive structure offered in it are more attractive and more mutually beneficial, internationally.

49m Peter asks are Trump tariff’s beneficial? Or not?
Every says it’s complicated. But what’s worse is that the anti-tariff
Trump Hater’s are speaking straight past the Trump vision thing.

55m An old insight from Every asks “Star Wars versus Star Trek?” Are we going towards to Star Wars future? Fraught with conflict and wars. Or a prosperous, exploring, high human potential Star Trek future, with AI and general purpose robots?

Peter note’s Musks goal to put data centers in space. Every replies what do you do when an adversary takes out that data center in space? How is it going to be protected? He concludes that until we get to cheap and truly abundant energy production, we’re going to have more Star Wars than Star Trek from time to time.

Truly, profound and timely insights.