That name of the building is the backstory I was referring to. That was a headnod to what was actually happening with Japanese investors moving in and buying up a lot of American real estate. I think that’s when a Japanese group bought the Plaza hotel in NYC for example and when Sony bought a movie studio (renamed it Sony pictures, but I think it was CBS movie division).
Gung Ho, staring Michael Keaton, is another movie example.
This is all just Japan from the 80s all over again. There are a bunch of movies from the period with Japan as the bogeyman. The peak probably being the backstory of Die Hard.
The key difference this time is the USA was paying for Japan’s defense, had a massive military base, etc. China doesn’t have that problem, so they can counter American demands with their own demands.
Interestingly, look at interviews with Trump from the 80s, he’ll talk about Japan almost with the same language that he uses for China now. The most famous was probably an appearance of Trump on Oprah.
Lol, I didn’t say any of that. But it’s a fact Goldberg has been a mouthpiece for the State department going back to at least the Iraq war in my opinion. He’s not a Trump guy but just doesn’t want to piss off any current administration so he won’t lose his access.
The reporter is a former IDF soldier, there is no way he would face any real blowback from Trump. There is a reason they had his number to add to the group and it’s because they were already feeding him information. The Atlantic is just a left coded mouthpiece for the State Department.
You’re noticing all the things that have happened since the Bureau have up trying to prevent the usage. Remember there was no way to electronically do anything like this for decades after the SSN was created. And the Bureau has no authority to enforce any kind of prevention, but was forced to support it’s usage as a result of the Federal government lack of action to come up with any other system for the last 90 years.
It’s important to remember social security numbers were created ONLY to track Social Security benefits. And the Social Security Bureau continually advised everyone to please not use them for a way to teach other things, but no one listened so here we are. The Bureau readily admits it’s not designed to do anything else . https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19697506/#%3A~%3Atext=Abstract%2Cas+a+nearly+universal+identifier.
There is just so much time in a day and I think nostalgia does come to play with this as well. Gaming tends to correlate to being younger and having more free time, so by playing the same games you did back then you’re reliving those days.
Just a thought anyway, I tend to play older games as well, but also newer games like Baldur’s gate 3 or Path of Exile 2.
That’s a good point. Snow Crash does lean heavily into the metaverse in a way that is very aligned with Zuckerberg’s concept of it. I remember early interviews with some silicon valley guys and when Stephenson was the darling out there l, like with the early Xbox guys or Google Earth.
Maybe Cyberpunk was popular too but just didn’t break through to more mainstream news.
Really I’d wager it’s more Snow Crash myself, it’s a book that most of these Silicon Valley guys would have grown up with.
This is Pinterest basically.
While a good series without a doubt, it suffers from the tradition of each book being about “100 pages too long” and in need of editing. It would be interesting to see if a newer LLM could do that in a way that would make it a tighter story.
Thiel had the board of Paypal vote to boot Musk out of the company while Musk was on his honeymoon. I can only hope something similar could happen while he is in DC sleeping at the foot of Trump’s bed.
This kind of thing is why it’s short-sighted even for the other tech guys to cozy up to Trump. There’s no room for anyone other than Musk and he is just going to use his leverage with Trump to screw over the other billionaires as well.
He probably needs all the H1B visas for his remote taxi drivers. I doubt the latency would be good enough otherwise. And it was clear in the ‘demo’ the pilot was just standing right there controlling it.
It’s because this wave of tech overlords rode in on the coattails of the actual smart group. No one in this new group has actual built/coded/designed anything good. Everything they actual get involved with is garbage. Musk Cyber truck and Zuck metaverse as two examples. Bezos isn’t even the CEO of Amazon anymore, and he had pretty much be letting Andy Jassy run AWS/Amazon for close to 2 decades anyway.
If Zuck gives Trump more money then why would he? Probably would just allow Meta to buy it or something dumb like that.
Don’t worry everyone, the new President is going to rename the Gulf of Mexico and annex Greenland, so that will take care of it!
I think you nearly overestimate the appetite of the USA government or people to engage in such a massive conflict over Taiwan. The new administration has made it clear support for Ukraine is on thin ice and a deal can be made with Russia to end the fighting. Why not with China as well?
But you have to factor in deliberate effort already to eliminate the CHIPS act by Congress. I’m sure it will get the axe in the new administration.
The rush had been increased because of the efforts Western governments like the USA have made to prevent China from getting the chips from Taiwan, that encourages the Chinese to develop their own capacity but also eliminated the hit they would take if processor production in Taiwan was crippled by conflict.
The actual ace in the hole protecting Taiwan is the fact that the Chinese want the Taiwanese to join willingly, but if the Chinese economy has continued trouble than Xi will be under pressure to demonstrate strength and that is where they could make a move on Taiwan.
This is a big reason why I continue to cringe whenever I hear one of the endless news stories or podcasts about how AI is going to revolutionize our society any day now. It’s clear they are being better with image generation but text ‘thinking’ is way too unreliable to use like human replacement knowledge workers or therapists, etc.