The Trump administration just pulled off the industrial policy equivalent of lighting your own house on fire to prove you have working smoke alarms.
On September 4 federal agencies swarmed Hyundai’s gleaming Georgia battery plant construction site like it was Pablo Escobar’s hacienda. Four hundred seventy five people were arrested, most of them South Korean nationals flown in by subcontractors to help build the very factory Trump’s White House has been bragging about for two years as proof America is “open for business.” It was the largest worksite raid in DHS history, which is less a milestone than a confession that your economic strategy and your immigration crackdown are literally punching each other in the face.
Diplomatically, Seoul is furious. The South Korean foreign ministry expressed “concern and regret,” which is diplomatic code for “you clowns just humiliated our investors and we have to pretend we still like you.” Keep in mind South Korean firms have pledged one hundred fifty billion dollars in U.S. investments, twenty six billion of that from Hyundai alone. So Washington begged Seoul to anchor its electric vehicle supply chain here, gave them fat tax incentives, and then Trump sent in stormtroopers to drag their engineers out of the trailer office. Nothing says ‘welcome partner’ quite like zip ties and detention buses.
No, Edward Saatchi is not going to recreate the Orson Welles cut of “The Magnificent Ambersons” using AI. “This project is so obviously vaporware if you think about it for two seconds. But this is the AI bubble, so nobody’s got two seconds.”
Brett @ttscoff@hachyderm.io Terpstra’s upcoming Marked 3 looks useful to me. I write in Markdown but often need to submit my work in Microsoft Word format, and Marked 3 will have flexible converters. Also, Marked 3 will provide a simple way to preview local documents using any website stylesheet.
Customer loyalty is a sham: Airlines, banks, and even your WiFi provider are taking advantage of your unwillingness to switch. “In this day and age, it’s par for the course for things to become more expensive over time. The newbies often get better deals, and the long-term customers get screwed.”
Nate Silver thinks BlueSky is a loser. Via Dave. Interesting opinions. I don’t know whether I agree.
