May I propose a tinfoil hat perspective on tariffing China: America is prepping the ground for a full war with China. That's the only position that make sense to me other than the obvious "these guys are all corrupt idiots". I don't know which is which but at least the war perspective makes more sense to me. I believe we are at the propaganda stage where allies will be 'encouraged' into adopting similar positions and portraying China as a global threat. Nations such as India, Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea and Australia are already encouraged to act highly aggressively towards China whenever possible. Given most of those countries political elite worship America and long to send their kids to Harvard they will comply and willingly allow their countries to be used as cannon fodder to maintain Western hegemony. The sweet-talking of Russia is an attempt to recreate the Sino-Russian split during the cold war and at least ensure Russia doesn't fight alongside China in a war. None of this is related to bringing jobs back, nation building or caring one bit about blue collar workers. its an attempt to maintain the American global hegemony that China very clearly threatens. If Trump and his close supporters can get filthy rich from this then all the better.
There is no grand geopolitical strategy here. Trump and his advisors really are this stupid and think that huge worldwide tariffs are a good idea. That they have kept 10% worldwide tariffs (also insane) shows they still think they are a good idea that will bring back manufacturing to the US. The damage to US soft power is irreversible unfortunately and the trust of former allies will never return. I suspect you’ll find as the empire declines people no longer aspire to send their kids - would you if they might be detained for weeks in inhumane conditions and deported for having opinions or a skin colour the regime doesn’t like?
Yes China is the current rival and thus was hit hardest, but they’ve already had to retract a lot of tariffs days after introduction simply because they had no idea what impact it would cause on borrowing costs.
Yes if Trump sees an opportunity to demand fealty from anyone with power or money he will take it, and enjoy it, but he genuinely thinks that is his due anyway.
You could say they have a plan in project 2025, but that’s more about destroying the US government and retaining power. If it were a functioning democracy he’d be removed after the damage he’s done.
My view is a more charitable one assuming there is some grand strategy going on but I think you are more on the money. It's just hard to accept that the administration really is so comically corrupt and incompetent
Unfortunately if this was the plan it massively backfired.
By imposing a global tariff the US also hit its allies in the region.
This in turn causes these allies to look for trade deals with others in the region, like China.
We have already seen South Korea and Japan announce new trade deals with China.
So the US is actually pushing away its allies in the region (which doesn't sound ideal when trying to start a war).
America's unwavering support for a lunatic country openly and joyously committing acts of unspeakable horrors probably not helping. Your president boasted on twitter about mass murdering a village tribal gathering. Wonderful country you got there
Why should I care if the tool I use to write boiler-plate code and suggest marinade recipes for chicken is censored? Theres plenty of censorship in chatgpt and Grok if you bring up topics involving US imperialism. It's quite an entitled view to believe this thing given to you for free needs to respect the beliefs widely held in your country but no where else.
Cancelled immediately after getting the email. I bought a pair of Office 2024 Professional Plus from a key reseller for £20 each for myself and my wife within the hour
These are from volume licenses. Not really legal but it mostly works in practice. In some cases the buyer gets unlucky and the volume key gets revoked due to too many activations, but either the seller will give you a replacement key, or it's just another few bucks for a new key.
What is a good way to check to ensure we are not being handed a key that will get revoked
Even in our markets, we have office licenses available on Amazon for all prices ...the cheapest ones looking very suspect but not so sure about the ones that cost a decent amount.
Might as well buy a used Office 2010 CD with the original key/packaging if you’re at it. The icons are all what’s changed since from a home user perspective.
It took less than a day to determine it was Russia and not only that but this specific ship that cut the cable. Yet years after the largest industrial sabotage and environmental disaster in recent memory (Nord Stream 2) absolutely no investigations into who caused that one and that story has been completely forgotten
Officials are becoming more and more alert to these kinds of situations.
Newnew Polar Bear managed to escape the scene of the crime without any issues, Yi Peng 3 managed to escape the scene of the crime but was later detained in international waters but not boarded without Chinese officials, and now Eagle S was caught red-handed and boarded immediately.
What? No investigation? This is pretty close to the top of the Wikipedia article on the matter:
The Swedish and Danish investigations were closed in February 2024 without identifying those responsible,[16][17] but the German investigation is still ongoing.[18] In August 2024 media reported that in June German authorities issued a European arrest warrant for a Ukrainian national suspected of having used the sailing yacht Andromeda together with two others to sabotage the Nord Stream pipeline.[19] As of June 2024 the suspect is still at large, having reportedly left the EU for Ukraine.[20]
This ship slowed down noticeably before destroying the cables so officials were quick to react. Also, not too long time ago another sabotage ship broke stuff as well so this was probably expected to happen again. Really does not have anything to do with Nord Stream 2 since it was different water areas and methods. But that whataboutism surely gives clue where your message comes from.
I’m sad that R’s tidy syntax is not copied more widely in the python world. Dplyr is incredibly intuitive most don’t ever bother reading the instructions you can look at a handful of examples and you’ve got the gist of it. Polars despite its speed is still verbose and inconsistent while pandas is seemingly a collection of random spells.
Lemme be the guy who farts in the elevator. Sweden has managed to avoid entangling itself in military conflicts around the world for centuries and by joining NATO it’s got itself security but at the expense of potentially involving itself in conflicts regardless if Swedes want to be involved or not. Anyways it seems popular in Sweden but the naive lefty in me still thinks it’s a shame at the collective high-fiving
> potentially involving itself in conflicts regardless if Swedes want to be involved or not
The Riksdag voted 269–37 to pass the NATO accession bill, and my understanding is that this is representative of the majority of the Swedish population.
Since NATO’s rules regarding military conflict are a rather conspicuous part of NATO membership, I’d hazard to say the Swedes are being quite explicit about the sort of involvement they desire.
Article 5 only says every other member "will assist" with "such action as it deems necessary"
International law is in many ways a ghost of what we think of as law. There are no enforcement mechanisms. If Sweden failed to involve itself and the USA/NATO wanted to push the point, we'd just apply trade pressure & sanctions to them. But we could and would do that same thing without Sweden being in NATO. (That's how we established the 'coalition of the willing' for the Iraq invasion, and how UN votes are organized)
Why should we celebrate neutrality in the face of evil? Surely Sweden would be more proud of its history if it had fought against the Nazis rather than helping them. WW2 would have been shorter as well.
The adjusted R^2 is not what indicates the quality of a result, but rather the p-value...R^2 indicates an effect size, whereas p-value indicates significance. A small R^2 just means there are other things that should be in the model.
- P-value is the result of a hypothesis test with the question being "is this effect size 0". The p-value is the probability of seeing the observed data under the assumption of the effect being zero.
- The R^2 is a measure of how well the regression model 'explains' the observed data so to speak.
- The effect size is contained in the coefficients assuming near perfect independence between the variables
Having priced warranty insurance products in the past, the relative cost of repairs standardised by new vehicle value at the time of sale, JD power ranks were not bad proxies but bit and miss for their mid-field. Toyota being below average in reliability? Not in warranty claims it isn’t. Porsche usually does well on JD power but their actual warranty bills (again, standardised for their price) are very high. JD is mostly based oN subjective impressions and electrical niggles in the first 90 days of ownership (niggles including difficulty of operation not necessarily failures). If they have changed the method since I last checked my apologies for spouting nonsense
