onfocus

Trump appeared today in the Oval Office with the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who, when questioned by reporters, refused to return Garcia, saying flatly, “Of course I’m not going to do it.” Although he could put a diplomatic end to the entire matter by asking Bukele to return the illegally deported U.S. resident, Trump sat there and allowed the president of a tiny Central American country to run the Oval Office appearance as if he were in charge.

This is such a shameful time for America. The end result of Republican reactionary politics is destroying the country they pretended to love.

Evoking the Declaration of Independence, the draft insists “he has demonstrated his character is marked by every act which may define a tyrant.” Arguably a truer description of Trump than of George III. He openly pines for dictatorship, autocracy, even un-American monarchy. He recognizes no limits on his power, no law he must obey, no rights he must respect.

There's a lot of work to do. Let's get going.

Costco, which defied demands from the Trump administration for private companies to spike their DEI programs, notched its 15th straight week of foot-traffic gains, although this week just by the skin of its teeth, with a gain of 0.3%.

Good. We should continue to only do business with companies that want a functioning society.

In its strange inversion of American politics, the Trump administration has come far closer to executing a Marxist theory of power than any of its progressive predecessors. It has waged class warfare, not against billionaires but against a far more ubiquitous enemy. And it has done so with a certainty that justifies terrible excesses, a desire to purge that it has only just begun to realize.

Still thinking about this article. This description of an attack on the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) rings true to me.

As grim as some of these responses feel, I hope there’s at least some small solace to be taken from the fact that so many artists remain firm in their resistance to AI technology that devalues their work, and are championing human creators in the face of it.

This is a tough read but a good antidote to the ai cheerleading you see everywhere.

The truth is that, assembled in the U.S. or not, the iPhone is a truly international device that is full of components manufactured all over the world and materials mined from dozens of different countries. Apple has what is among the most complex supply chains that has ever been designed in human history, and it is not going to be able to completely change that supply chain anytime soon.

This administration uses pure BS to justify destroying the US. It’s a lot like their mode of governing during election denialism at the end of Trump I.

The suit argues that there is no connection between the fentanyl epidemic – which Trump has cited as a reason for invoking the emergency powers – and the tariffs. “The means of an across-the-board tariff does not fit the end of stopping an influx of opioids, and is in no sense ‘necessary’ to that stated purpose,” the complaint filed on behalf of Simplified argues.

When you've lost the libertarians...

Even on a long enough timeline, there is no world in which the techno-optimist utopia comes to be in the United States under protectionist, isolationist policies. The Trump administration has also set to work dismantling the academic, scientific, research, and immigration infrastructures that have allowed business and innovation to thrive in the US, and the soft-power structures that have made it easy for tech companies to enter and dominate markets all over the world.

Yes, they are destroying all of things that allowed the techbros to come to power. But maybe this administration is them pulling up the ladder behind them now that they have power? They don't want competition from anything new. (They've read The Innovator's Dilemma.)

Nobody in the world – not one single human being anywhere – knows how to make a mouse. It’s orders of magnitude too complex for a solitary mind. Like a thousand other everyday objects, it is a staggering achievement of modern society, the product of a thousand thousand simple ideas working together.

This post from 2012 illustrates why bunker mentality for a country won't work in the modern world. If we want a modern technological society, we need to be interconnected with people across the globe.

The immediate political challenge for Trump is that, regardless of the prospects of his policies boosting U.S. manufacturing over the long term, in the short term they are likely to inflict pain on two major constituents of the G.O.P. coalition: working-class maga voters and Republicans in business.

Right!? You would think this is the case in a normal world. I guess we’ll see how strong the cult thinking is.

The administration argued that it cannot bring back Abrego Garcia because he’s in Salvadoran custody and knocked down concerns that he’s likely to be tortured or killed at CECOT.

If this isn’t pure evil I don’t know what is. In the future, please vote for people who won’t send people to foreign countries specifically to deny them due process and then refuse to act when they made a mistake. If these people are guilty, bring evidence and let them have their day in court. That’s the American way.

Crawford defeated Brad Schimel, who received financial support from Elon Musk and an endorsement from President Donald Trump. Her victory means that the nonpartisan court's 4-3 liberal majority will remain in place.

Good to know there are some things Musk can't buy.