Bringing tariffs down in the past literally took decades. Politically it’s very hard, because the benefits of trade go to everyone and the benefits of tariffs go to special interests. As a rule, special interests tend to win out.

Because it’s arbitrary discrimination against their exporters. This is putting aside the forced purchases and investments Trump is demanding of various countries.

All these TACO memes are wearing pretty thin. Trump has instituted a minimum of 10% tariffs on all trading partners, with scant prospect of them ever lowering in the future even after his presidency (once tariffs go up, it’s very hard to bring them down because of the special interests that come to depend on them). He has strongarmed the EU, Japan, and other countries into accepting these permanently elevated tariff levels without retaliation. Only 3 countries have shown any sort of backbone against this: China, Canada, and Brazil (maybe India, but it’s too soon to say). In all the other cases, Trump ain’t the one chickening out, it’s the other side that abjectly folded.

(It doesn’t matter, by the way, if the Europeans intend to slow walk the investments and weapon purchases they promised to Trump, or whatever. That’s copium. The point is that they bent to Trump’s will, and once you cave to a bully, he’ll be back for more.)

That was the rice minister (really).

In some dimensions, current day LLMs are already superintelligent. They are extremely good knowledge retrieval engines that can far outperform traditional search engines, once you learn how properly to use them. No, they are not AGIs, because they’re not sentient or self-motivated, but I’m not sure those are desirable or useful dimensions of intellect to work towards anyway.

Hydropower is literally good for the climate.

The kneejerk reaction is gonna be “Meta bad”, but it’s actually a bit more complicated.

Whatever faults Meta has in other areas, it’s been mostly a good player in the AI space. They’re one of the major reasons we have strong open-weight AI models today. Mistral, another maker of open AI models and Europe’s only significant player in AI, has also rejected this code of conduct. By contrast, OpenAI a.k.a. ClosedAI has committed to signing it, probably because they are the incumbents and they think the increased compliance costs will help kill off competitors.

Personally, I think the EU AI regulation efforts are a big missed opportunity. They should have been used to force a greater level of openness and interoperability in the industry. With the current framing, they’re likely to end up entrenching big proprietary AI companies like OpenAI, without doing much to make them accountable at all, while also burying upstarts and open source projects under unsustainable compliance requirements.

The EU AI Act is the thing that imposes the big fines, and it’s pretty big and complicated, so companies have complained that it’s hard to know how to comply. So this voluntary code of conduct was released as a sample procedure for compliance, i.e. “if you do things this way, you (probably) won’t get in trouble with regulators”.

It’s also worth noting that not all the complaints are unreasonable. For example, the code of conduct says that model makers are supposed to take measures to impose restrictions on end-users to prevent copyright infringement, but such usage restrictions are very problematic for open source projects (in some cases, usage restrictions can even disqualify a piece of software as FOSS).

Pretty much the same set of circumstances as in Europe. Slow economic growth + dissatisfaction about young voters + inflation + establishment party lacking any plan beyond muddling along => populist revolt => governing gets even harder and things get worse.

Chinese steel is cheaper than Canadian steel… Canadian steel is being targeted by tariffs in America, we need to make sure that as many Canadian companies as possible are using Canadian steel

This makes no logical sense. When Canadian steel are priced out of the US by tariffs, the supply available for domestic use goes up, which would normally cause the price to fall, already automatically reducing the price advantage of Chinese steel.

Basically, this is a convoluted way to keep steel prices high, to the detriment of Canadian manufacturers that use steel.

Protecting local industries a.k.a. pandering to special interests. Sectoral tariffs are just as corrupt and pernicious when Trump levies them on Canadian steel and cars, as when Canada levies them on other countries’ steel and cars.

France already has one of the most progressive tax systems in the OECD. Their main problem is the opposite: the tax system is too narrow. Generally, European welfare states function by levying high taxes on everyone. Problem with France is that they try to have a welfare state without taxing the middle class enough. For example, it levies 5% lower VAT than the Nordics, and grants lots more exemptions.