Favorites: Political Whiplash, AI Pitfalls, and Private Equity Wins
February 3rd 2025, Bernie goes free-trade, Barnes & Noble goes private—this week is full of plot twists
After all that Mexico found (cached) an off ramp for the tariffs, Canada too, Trudeau promised improved border security, although it seems it’s the same promise (cached) he already made back in December.
If it's unclear what's going on here, as he explains issue is that the "surgeon is the boy's mother" answer to the original is so ridiculously overrepresented in the data that LLMs have trouble not going with variations of that as the answer.
Dang that’s a big laser
Flotsam and Jetsam
– It certainly sounds surprising but it’s true: Barnes & Noble’s comeback has been the result of Private Equity buying the company. (src)(cached)
– Suddenly Bernie Sanders is pro free trade (cached). Negative polarization at work again perhaps? (src)(cached)
– This new guy under Rubio at the State Department seems to be actively opposed to NATO and wants to ally with China. And he has explicitly stated (cached) that the US should not defend Taiwan. To top it off, he was previously fired by Trump campaign for being too racist (cached) (src)(cached)
– The return of Trump in the US has absolutely crushed Conservative Party popularity in Canada. (src)(cached)
– Morgan Stanley has a cheat sheet for what to do in various possible tariff situations (src)(cached)
– Here’s a thread about the ~22 year olds Musk is elevating to top government posts (src)(cached)
– Entities with standing to sue over USAID situation are contractors. None have yet, but it’s still early (src)(cached)
– Musk says he’s eliminated IRS Direct File, seems like this is the opposite of efficiency considering it’s low cost and high value? The alternative is everyone continuing to pay TurboTax rent (cached) for no reason. Kelsey Piper expands on this (cached), DOGE seems to be mostly doing the opposite of what it promised. Good news is that Direct File is still online for the moment, and the treasury secretary promised direct file would continue to be available (cached) during his confirmation two weeks ago. (src)(cached)
– USAID is a soft target, it’s not that popular, but if they can unilaterally shut down its funding, despite congressional approval, they can do it for anything. (src)(cached)
– Amusing joke video about Canadians avoiding US goods during the trade war