At this point I think its more of a strategic reserve of gold for non-financial purposes. In terms of our budget/debt/spending its not a significant amount. We could sell it all and make not one dent in anything.
He has to announce some bullshit every day to Capture Attention or someone else is going to get the Attention. And that puts pressure on him to keep announcing things, more than anything else.
Given how the Attention Economy works Content keeps exploding, but eyeballs and time to consume it all don't grow at the same rate, so post frequency and absurdity of the posts shall grow with time. Keep count.
Also, new bullshit today prevents people from thinking too deeply about yesterday’s bullshit. If Trumpers thought too long about yesterday’s report on those 150 year olds getting SS, they might realize all the holes in it, so distract. We are truly in an idiocracy.
"I'm always surprised to see a fair amount of support for DOGE here. I'd love to understand why these people think this is OK."
So consider the guy who makes $100k/year and spends $200k/year. Over the course of enough years what must inevitably happen here?
I think making financial decisions to avoid what amounts to bankruptcy is OK.
Now, the US wont ever go "bankrupt" or "default" of course, but it will absolutely print money to service the debt on its bonds. Bond holders tend not to like that and sooner or later will demand higher payments in exchange for the use of their money thus increasing our "minimum monthly payment" on our giant credit card.
Sooner or later we get to a death spiral situation - nobody knows when that will be or what set of circumstances will trigger it - and when/if it does finally happen it will somehow take everyone by surprise. Nothing is so surprising as the inevitable when it finally occurs.
Surplus? LOL!! If we cut a massive $1T from our nearly $2T deficit every year that would be considered a radical success. Thats how screwed up things are. Nobody is even talking about a BUDGET SURPLUS here. Sometimes I don't think people realistically see how deep the hole is.
As for a less chaotic way to go about it, both Democrats and Republicans have been screaming about a balanced budget for as long as I can remember (Im not young) and now we finally have someone willing to attack the problem seriously.
I mean we all know how to do it, simply cut THE OTHER GUYS programs and then we can afford OUR programs. Simple right? What we have here is a Republican administration deciding where to make cuts and a Democratic party unhappy about it. Donald Trump could literally save planet earth and the democratic party wouldn't have a nice word to say about him. This is the exactly how the Republican party treated President Obama for 8 years.
The US is very backwards in a lot of important ways. Since you're in Australia it might be hard for you to see but about half the country is perfectly happy with whats going on and they knowingly voted for exactly this. Its not a surprise this is happening and if anything is surprising about it a politician is actually doing the thing he promised to do.
The complaints and panic energy you see around this topic seems to stem from the fact that the Republican party has the executive branch and both chambers of congress in addition to a sympathetic supreme court (read FULL CONTROL). The party in power today can more or less do whatever it wants and the opposing party can only make complaints among themselves while mounting literally any legal challenge they can come up with in hopes of slowing the process down.
We started having budget surpluses during the Clinton administration and paying down the national debt. Republicans regained control of congress and swiftly put an end to it because obviously if have enough money to pay down the debt taxes are too high.
Congress alone has the power of the purse per the Constitution. The idea the executive has absolute discretion to ignore statutes is absurd.
You either support the Constitution and the republic. The unitary executive types, and most especially those who encourage ignoring the courts, stand in opposition to both.
By the way. What did Trump promise about Russia and Ukraine? Did he promise to lie about Ukraine starting the war? Call a democratic ally a dictator while formalizing negotiations with war criminals who published a genocide handbook stating their clear intent? Do you suppose Americans expect Trump give Putin everything he wants without preconditions or expecting anything in return? That's what he's doing.
Pretty sure Americans weren't expecting Trump to promise invasion of Canada, Greenland or Panama either.
For those stateside you can still do this in a local office apparently. Not ideal but its not as if passport issuance has been suspended. The site is under maintenance to remove modifications made for more than 2 genders according to a quick search. Medicaid payment's were down for a few days last week too. Not ideal by any means but far from world ending.
If you try to play something down always ask yourself „Was it necessary?“. Was it necessary to shutdown these systems down to change some gender selections?
This is the playbook of a company moving from "Growth" to "Maturity". Of note:
In August 2024, Alphabet announced a quarterly dividend of $0.20 per share, totaling $0.80 annually, resulting in a dividend yield of approximately 0.39%
At current that would mean Alphabet's annual dividend payout is approximately $9.8112 billion.
Now the game is to pay that dividend, incentivize people to hold the stock and reduce volatility. A dividend stock company behaves very differently than a growth stock company.
Whats really frightening here is that a company like Google looks into the future and sees bad prospects for growth.
My take (launched Samsung Galaxy device series in the US, did work for Nokia/HTC/LG/etc.)... the ad business was always based on attention dominance through search.
Android has performed its primary function - preventing the exclusive dominance of mobile including operator relations by Apple, which threatened Google's attention dominance.
Chrome the platform (minimal cloud-oriented laptop OS) has gone nowhere.
Fitbit (wearable fitness monitor) is a dead leading product in a dead market in an era of smart watches. We had one free and never used it.
Nest (smart home controller) has filled its niche, the 'smart home' never eventuated, most people are happy flicking a light switch once a day and living without remote-accessible CCTV with doorbell integration.
Pixel (Google phone) was only ever a US product.
The problem now for Google is AI is a better search engine. Google's search business is dead unless they upgrade their offering immediately. They get one chance at this (at least, rolling upgrades for <12 months). If they screw up, the company's value will deflate rapidly.
Crystal balling, I would see through this a cashflow freeze also for Alphabet hardware plays like Wing which seem to be bloated operations with multinational presence and no revenue stream, and mutually inconsistent messaging (re. building "aircraft library" vs. "specific aircraft required for specific cargo due to physics" vs. biggest headline partner = Walmart = highly varied cargo requirement).
Personally I view the tariffs as a threat to get compliance. Its possible the goal is to get them to "have a brilliant idea" and invest in some American production. I don't know why but Asking Nicely never works for anything, why should international trade be any different.
> possible the goal is to get them to "have a brilliant idea" and invest in some American production
TSMC built a massive plant in Arizona. It's been hitting rocks, from frustration over "rigorous working conditions," e.g. people being "called into work for emergencies in the middle of the night," to differences in manufacturing cultures, e.g. "employees were expected to pitch in with work outside their job descriptions because construction of the facility was behind schedule" which "did not sit well with everyone" [1].
> I don't know why but Asking Nicely never works for anything, why should international trade be any different.
America literally failed to compete. We had fabs, even competitive and industry-leading ones, for several decades. But Intel didn't adopt EULV and whether or not you agree with their business decision, that left America without a leading node. TSMC and Samsung would take up ASML's EULV spec and the rest is history. America fell off the map with our "14nm+++++ Advanced TurboYield" technology, and the almighty belief in free market competition didn't provide us with a new champion.
The reason tariffs like this are necessary at all is because America cannot sell chips unless the government tips the scales with their fat meaty finger. Nobody wants our chips. Intel and Apple both gave up trying to make laptops on American silicon. AMD and Nvidia both orbit around the EULV suppliers because they're both cheaper and more advanced.
This is a temper-tantrum in response to realizing that government subsidy is the only other way to stimulate production.
Perhaps the opposite is true: Maybe Zuck found the courage to stand up for what he's come to believe in as he's matured as a person and a leader. Maybe what we're seeing now is a Zuck thats willing to say No More. Its seems rational that what we're seeing is just exactly that and that he actively wishes to be aligned with the policies of the new administration as he sees merit in their approach and ideas.
Where is the solo founder startup thats up and running today where the non-technical founder used AI to generate all code and infrastructure?
You are precisely correct. However I use AI regularly to write what Ive come to call Nuisance Code, which is for example: I need a function to find the highest peak and lowest valley in this example stream of data points.
Can I do that? Sure I can do that. Will I have to think about it for a minute and fire up the debugger here and there, drop a few log print statements to get it running? You bet I will. Will I have to dig around in my memory for the last time I did a thing like this, oh yeah.
Can I tell AI what my stream of data looks like, tell it I want a list of peaks and valleys in the data, get some code and run it the first time, today? Yes I can.
Someone is always going to have to break the ask down into discrete logical units for implementation then precisely describe that work. This person is always going to be a developer.
Tell him your accounting department can only issue paper checks. Get his name and address "for the check" or course. Also your accounting department can't issue any check with out an invoice, so he needs to give you a detailed invoice.
Then you can out him or take up legal action, or send some goons over to his house for that matter.
If you really want to have some fun tell him you're happy to pay him but he must become and Approved Vendor first ... and boy thats a process but you want paid right? This is the only way accounting will pay anybody. Sorry :)
Billionaires keep their massive wealth invested in assets rather than cash in their checking account. We had significant inflation in '24 and with that dollars got smaller. The resulting impact is that the billionaire who was worth $10B now had $12B as the valuations of their owned assets changed with inflation.
So "Billionaires kept pace with inflation in 2024" is probably a more accurate headline.
