toucana

As economists struggle to make sense of the bizarre list of punitive tariffs announced yesterday by president Trump, some noticed that the listings appear to have been organised by TLDs (top level domain) i.e the internet country code suffix - which provides one clue (amongst several) that this list was compiled with the help of an LLM (large language model) AI chatbot system such as ChatGPT Vibe Code https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/did-an-llm-help-write-trumps-trade A surreal list of obscure and largely uninhabited islands that are being punished with trade tariffs was compiled in this report by Rachel Maddow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lStWAhGfxn0 It includes: * Tokelau (.tk) - 3 small Pacific islands mainly famous for their ‘swimming pigs’ - 10% tariff * Keeling Islands (.cc) - 2 small Indian Ocean islands pop. 593 -10% tariff * Jan Mayen (.sj) - volcanic island in Arctic Ocean, uninhabited - 10% tariff * Heard Island & Macdonald Island (.hm) - uninhabited Antarctic islands -10% tariff *Falkland Islands (.fk) - South Atlantic, pop. 3200 + 1 million penguins - 41% tariff ! Paul Krugman. a Nobel Prize-winning economist had this to say: When approached for comment, the White House claimed that their new tariffs were calculated using the formula shown below, and gave a link to this webpage: https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations The problem is that every single academic economist interviewed has denounced this formula as being completely meaningless ‘Voodoo Mathematics' of a type never previously seen in international economic modelling. Critics point out that the selected parameter values for ε and φ cancel out According to the BBC Verify this formula actually boils down to:

I really wouldn't bother. Most ppl who have read your comments in this thread will probably concur with a piece of advice originally attributed to Mark Twain:

Are you kidding me ? I grew *up* with the music of David Bowie and many others of the era (I recall watching him perform ‘Space Oddity’ his very first hit on TOTP in 1969). I lived through the summer of ’69 and heard all the music of the Doors, the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead etc. the first time round, as well as the second and third… On the subject of language - I’m currently on a 1,932 day unbroken streak on Duolingo (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Scottish Gaelic) - Check me out there if you wish to have a discussion about language

OK - let's assume that English is my fifth language (it isn't) - perhaps you'd like to explain precisely what nuance in "hmmm" I'm missing ?

If you had read the link I supplied about the Sturmabteilung (SA), then you might also have found this threaded article about their uniforms and insignia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniforms_and_insignia_of_the_Sturmabteilung The point is that practically all of the various titles and ranks commonly associated with the worst manifestations of the German Nazi military machine such as Fuhrer, Sturmfuhrer, Gruppenfuhrer and Obergruppenfuhrer - were all originally invented out of thin air by the Sturmabteilung in the early 1930s, and were later adopted in toto by the Schutzstaffel (SS) which took over their role after ‘The Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934. No such ranks or insignia existed in the regular Wehrmacht (Army) or Kriegsmarine (Navy). None of this was about ‘fashion’ or ‘looks’. It was about the systematic weaponisation of racist and antisemitic street thugs into organised paramilitary groups by cladding them in war surplus uniforms and giving them imaginary military ranks in order to channel their aggression, and control their violence and hatreds. That is why fascists “..always need a uniform”.

The mineral cooling oil in itself is an excellent dielectric medium as you say, but unfortunately that situation changes rather rapidly when it escapes, catches fire (it has a low flash-point) and is then mixed with with water and firefighting foams. Aqueous Film-Forming Foam (AFFF) which is designed for fighting Class B fires (flammable liquids) is positively lethal if applied to a Class C electrical fire, because the chemical foam concentrate is even more conductive than water. That is what I meant to convey.

X is trying to hide this from view by tagging it as 'Adult Content' - Can't think why.

Real military units, real military insignia, real military ranks - as opposed to the ersatz fake ones favoured by cosplay fascist paramilitaries trying to make their penises feel bigger 😛

Because paramilitary fascist organisations always cosplay and borrow their uniforms and insignia from real ones. The German SA (Sturmabteilung - ‘storm troopers’) of the 1930s became known as ‘Brown Shirts’ because they adopted a uniform of brown Lettow-shirts and ties which were bought in bulk as cheap war surplus issue that was originally meant for use by German colonial troops in Africa during WW1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung Mussolini’s ‘Black Shirt’ paramilitary thugs adopted all black uniforms based on those worn by the Arditi who were an elite shock force unit of the Italian army in WW1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackshirts

https://www.hindustantimes.com/photos/reimagining-president-donald-trump-in-studio-ghibli-style-artwork-photos-101743085800483-1.html

Oh they knew all right - they just didn’t care because they are all invested in a toxic culture of iconoclasm and norm-breaking, the Elon Musk inspired ethos of - “If it’s working let’s break it first, worry about fixing it later, and screw the rules”. They have the bravado and the arrogance to believe they won’t be caught, or that if they are, they won’t be held to account by anyone. That is part of what I meant by the IRC analogy - The NSC meets the wild west of EFNET (for those who can remember) - “Hey does anyone know how to drive this thing ? Screw it - who cares”.

This frankly wasn’t conducted in the manner of a serious OPSEC meeting. Parts of it are oddly reminiscent of reading the IRC (internet relay chat) news-feed discussions that took place from August 1990 onwards when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The Iraqi invaders pulled the normal phone lines but forgot to take out the internet links, and a group of computer science students at Kuwait University managed to keep a covert IRC chat server running online for a fortnight which was the practically the only available source of information in the world on what was happening inside Kuwait. For a brief period of time, US intelligence operatives rubbed shoulders with a shadowy network of computer geeks, and a tiny number of journalists who knew about IRC - all in the same chatroom. The SignalGate logs have the same sense of surreality.

Signal group membership lists work very much as they do in WhatsApp or Messenger groups. Anyone in the group can tap the group chat icon at the top of the screen, then scroll down the menu and select ‘View Members’. Only the group admin can add new members, and can do so either by name, initials, or telephone # (see screenshot below). Not all the members of this group were high-profile NSC principals. Some were junior aides from the CIA or DNI acting as POC (point of contact) or support staff. Anyone who was identified only by their initials would be taken for a low-order spook of this type whose identity was being veiled for security reasons. The higher profile political figures present like JD Vance and Marco Rubio are all narcissists. They wouldn’t care about knowing who all the non-entities in the group were. They would only care that everyone else in the group knew how important and powerful *they* were.

A rather unusual take on SignalGate comes courtesy of a YT channel called ‘I Ask AI’ - where the channel host has run the news story and screen shots through Chat GPT, and then asks the AI to summarise: what happened, what it all reveals about Trump’s second term, and what the consequences should be for all those involved ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdIh3lNlgAk The answers are surprisingly on point (see sample below) especially in respect of the wholly transactional nature of Team Trump’s mindset. Although it seems that ChatGPT also thinks that *it* should be the one running things rather the Trump administration - and who would be inclined to disagree with it atm !

Not quite as strange or unprecedented as you might think. You may recall a press story from December 2016 when it became known that Jared Kushner had asked the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak if the Trump transition team could set up a back-channel communication link with the Kremlin *inside* the premises of the Russian embassy - because they trusted Russian diplomatic communication systems more than the official American ones. https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/26/politics/jared-kushner-russian-ambassador-kremlin/index.html Then there was the matter of a Trump loyalist and former Moscow resident called Carter Page who was placed under investigation by the FBI in October 2016 as a potential foreign agent. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/22/trump-administration-releases-carter-page-wiretap-documents Carter Page travelled to Moscow in July 2016, and again on 8 December 2016 (just after Trump’s election) ostensibly to help arrange a $500M brokerage fee for the sale of a 19% stake in Rosneft (part of the Russian state energy giant Gazprom). But there have long been allegations (Steele dossier et passim) that he also met a Russian intelligence operative Igor Divyekin, and discussed a deal involving the acquisition of compromising material on Hillary Clinton, and the use of Russian bot-farms for a weaponised disinformation campaign to help Trump win the 2016 US presidential election. One version of this conspiracy theory says that Vladimir Putin asked for a pledge of Trump’s good faith, and received a copy of a recording of Trump speaking in person to accept the deal.