One man is standing up to Donald Trump's ban on US chip tech going to Huawei. That man... is Donald Trump President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he wants America's semiconductor industry to be able to do business around the globe, calling into question a reported trade rule change targeting Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei. The Wall Street Journal on Monday claimed the US Commerce Department is drafting changes to its …
"I suspect senility."
Wouldn't be the first time. You can go on YouTube and find one of their previous presidents (Ronal Reagan) having to be told by his wife what he should be saying to the camera crew. His brain was in a state that made Swiss cheese feel whole. Said noted Nazi supporter (or at least dude who liked to lay wreathes on the graves of Nazis) was like that for at least 50% of his presidency.
Or perhaps, senility brought on by years of Adderall abuse.
It's been mentioned in the press that it's possible. I know my former wife is in an institution for early onset dementia/senility (there's some arguing over which it is) that was brought on by too many surgeries and too many pain meds.
Cue the usual deluded defenders of the current idiot in chief
One even seems to have taken the trouble to vote down every post on this page that's critical of the Orangenius. But I suppose that could equally be the work of the Mechanical Turk: no point in having money if you can't make it work for you.
It's about 2:20 AM Pacific time. I'll bet a plugged nickle that that one downvote will change to about 4 inside 10 hours. That's what the pattern has been, anyway ... suggesting that there are a total of only 4 pro-Trump ElReg commentards. Maybe there's hope for the lot of us yet?
He really has no idea, does he?
After all, he claims to be an intelligent person.
Covfefe.
I'm wondering whether the senility will kick in properly if he's re-elected and he goes full Uncle Hank:
Q: "Mr President, What is you're policy on North Korea?"
A: "Ass to Ass!"
Q: "What kind of trade deal will you do with the UK?"
A: "Ass to Ass!"
Q: "Mr President how do your two terms of office compare?"
You get the idea...
Someone might want to remind the Orange One that one of his buddies is about to permanently destroy the USA's national security.
Specifically, Oracle.
You know, the one he backed to win in that ridiculous, yet ongoing, API case.
An Oracle win there means the USA effectively gets to import any software from the 1930s onward. No tech company will be able to stay alive in the resultant litigation if the Supreme Court sides with Oracle.
And that's if the EU and various Asian countries even decide to license the aforementioned software. They could just say "nope, the rest of the world gets to use this, but under Berne since the USA considers these copyrighted, we're simply going to deny licenses".
What use is silicon without software?
What use is silicon without software?
- sealant
- lubrication (but not that kind of lubricant)
- giving ones bust a little lift (a poor use I'll grant you, especially now that saline has been proven)
- As a material for, ahem, toys
I can see I'm tacking far too much into my comfort zone. As you were.
... that's all silicone, not silicon.
Silicone is a polymer constructed from a chain of alternating silicon and oxygen atoms - without the silicon, you'd just have some oxides. Apart from Bulgarian airbags, silicon is a major constituent of all sorts of other useful things - pottery, glass, concrete, aluminium-silicon castings (like engine blocks) and, of course, golden beaches.
Have you seen the @PresVillain Twitter feed?
I'm partial to the "Blumpf" ones, with the shruken face screaming Trump.
You have to hand it to those "dissident" right wing 4channers who meme'd Trump in to office in 2016. Within a couple days of turning on him, they had better anti-Trump memes than the left had managed in 3 years.
Everyone knows that sure junk food tastes good but if you continue to feast on this continually it eventually catches up with you.
Same thing goes for junk news. He is merely the product of an over excessive consumption of Fox News. And whats worse we are in a Fox News feedback loop, with his excrement feeding Fox News, that feeds him. Its not pretty whichever way you look at it.
It's the reason the Republican party is what it is, and people are willing to vote for this criminal idiot.
It's clear Brexit happened because of tabloids blaming Europe for everything. We have started down this path, if we let them destroy the BBC we will be much further down the the same route as the US.
I hope that you were not visualizing him talking out if his arse, because while that might be true, the harm that it does to you lasts for a very long time.
What you have to realize is that Trump don't just have an arsehole, he is an arsehole. He is a total areshole. So whether he is talking out of his arse, or his mouth, it always going to be shit.
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Johnson may lie as much as Trump but he allegedly has no actual ideology and his buffoonery is carefully crafted to make him more relatable to non-Oxbridge folks, while Trump is about as knowledgeable as his base…
I don't know if this makes things better, I guess we'll soon find out.
Johnson is no idiot, but to call him smart is just wrong...
He IS very well educated, and so are a lot of the other ignorant 'leading' class in this country, well able to spout forth erudite quotes. However, if you get them talking with actually clever people. the illusion quickly vanishes.
Trump is a 'special' case...
Everyone who ever seems to have worked with him (and that has been a lot) seems to say the same thing: not as smart as he thinks he is, and desperate to be liked.
He obviously has charisma and can possibly be very affable. Unfortunately, these are not the traits of a good leader but of an easily manipulated pawn. He's had his strings pulled by whoever currently bankrolls The Telegraph and has entered a pact with the Devil in the shape of Dominic Cummings, who evidently is smart but also possibly a psychopath.
Johnson is smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is.
Trump is way smarter than his enemies think (which is faint praise, but still). It suits him to let them think he's dumb, and that's why he's president today. But if he seems dumb to you, that's just because you haven't worked out what he's doing yet.
(Hint: a big part of it is "riling up his base" and, just as importantly, "riling up the Democratic base". Because the more riled they get, the more bitter the primary battle will be, and the weaker the candidate that will emerge from it. Trump's dream is of a Democratic nominee whom barely half of their own party will vote for, and he's well on the way to achieving that now.)
When I saw Trump and Johnson together I could not help but notice the similarity.
Both are fat blokes with a privileged upbringing, trying to sharpen their "man of the people " chops while shitting on a solid gold toilet */ quoting the classics* (delete as applicable).
Both seem to have a problem with marital faithfulness, and seem to favour younger trophy wives.
Both seem to have flip-flopped politically during their lives, as it suits them.
Given Trump's inability to keep it in his pants, and the fact that rather too coincidentally Boris Johnson was also born in NY city, I feel a paternity test is probably in order.
He sounds like a really bad expert system (AI requires INTELLIGENCE and so far no so called AI can demonstrate any of that) is writing all his tweets for him. It constantly tells everyone that he is awesome at everything, that there has never been a better POTUS, that everything he says, does, touches, is GOLD! And yet he can't seem to back any of it up with anything other than more flimflam. The US has voted for a badly managed pyramid scheme to lead it, and we all know how pyramid schemes end up, and who ends up having to clean up the wreckage. As for BoJo and ScoMo, they are just sad second tier pyramid schemers.
And in what world does the US think it can impose on a Taiwanese company who it can deal with ?
If TSMC gets notice that it cannot sell to Huawei, it should shrug and say "sure", and continue right on dealing with Huawei. America's problems are not Taiwan's problems, Taiwan has bigger fish to fry.
And if the US starts getting uppity and saying thing like unless you do as we say we will stop dealing with you, well, let's just say I'd like to see Trump try that. The US can't live a day without the chips TSMC makes for it. Apple would have an aneurysm, Intel would have an attack, IBM would lie helpless on a gurney and HPE would be agonizing.
A measure like that would last all of 24 hours before the entire IT industry would scream for its reversal with its dying breath.
I am sure they could impose contractual demands, at least on future purchases.
However, such things only damage US industry. Not only because they'll lose sales in the short term, but because their clients will simply be forced to source equipment from elsewhere, or develop their own domestic capacity.
The US is important, but not important enough to be able to destroy China's tech industry. Far from protecting US interests, the US would find that all it does is give overseas companies the golden opportunity to take over a market the US dominated.
The US has slowly - but inevitably - followed the sugar crumbs China has been laying for the past few decades, and grown fat and moribund as a result. Now it's trying to go on a diet, but those cookies are just too good.
And given how much US Dollar debt the Chinese are holding, it's probably not a great idea to push them into a corner. There would only be one winner in that case.
> And given how much US Dollar debt the Chinese are holding, it's probably not a great idea to push them into a corner. There would only be one winner in that case.
Yeah, the rest of the world.
If the dollar goes to shit, the US economy will suffer, but the Chinese one will crumble into dust. If the US tanks its own currency, all the reserves China has will mean nothing.
That's why it's said that if you owe the bank 100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank 100 million, it's the bank's problem.
Did the sub-prime mortgage fiasco not teach you guys anything?
If America's economy goes into the garbage disposal, it drags everyone else with it.
America is a great country at its best, but when it sucks it sucks hard.
During the great recession it was barely felt in Canada because our previous Liberal government had gotten the books in order, prevented the big banks from merging and kept in place sane financial regulation. Even the inept Stephen Harper couldn't screw it up enough, though he did try.
Trump is a buffoon, but you might be just as big a buffoon as he is, if you don't realize that the US has a ton of leverage over Taiwan.
Without the US deterring it, China would have Crimea'd Taiwan a long time ago.
You are seriously deluded if you think Taiwan has "bigger fish to fry". Without the US, they'd get fried and eaten by China.
You might not like it, I sure don't, but these are the advantages of being a superpower. You get to impose your will over weaker countries, you get to throw your weight around, sometimes literally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaIfjHNCeQQ.
And when you are a smaller country looking for protection from a much bigger and more powerful neighbour, you gotta do what you gotta do. And if you gotta choose between deals with China and deals with Western companies, my guess is that deals with Western companies are still 10-100 times more profitable. No matter how big the Chinese market is, the country overall is still poor and underdeveloped.
Of course we can -- we merely threaten to impose crippling financial penalties on the company's US subsidiaries or parent. That's how we closed down Nord Stream 2 -- it night have been a Swiss company working for the Germans and Russians but we just gave 'em 30 days to comply -- OR ELSE - and they folkded.
We can keep this up indefinitely because we know that other countries can't disconnect themselves from the financial system we dominate or mangage without our input or technology.....oh wait.....damn......now I see what Trump is on about.......
Say what you want, The Orange has made it to the top. A perfect role model for schoolyard bullies everywhere.
He's for something today, and against tomorrow. While everybody else is still mopping up from yesterdays ramblings, He has moved on and tweeted again. We can never catch up and eventually give up and tune out.
He has managed to establish dual standards. Any minor gaffe by his opponents gets amped up to 11, but we have given up caring about His blatant lies, which in either case are just misquoted by the liberal deep state cabal media. I am losing hope that any presidential candidate will be a match for that. Reason will not work against Him.
In the meantime, his stooges in the adminstration do the real damage, and we are too distracted to notice.
Well, you seemed to be on point until your third paragraph. When you've seen the same thing a thousand times you don't need to see the thousand and first. Trump is offal that is the culmination of Fox News and the Republican party's gaslighting, almost the embodiment of it, and he needs to go. That's all we need to know, no further attention is needed, certainly not when nobody with any power is actually going to do something about it. They hem and they haw, and they find ways to crawl through their own ass to not actually stop him.
We're watching the ones that are finding ways to not stop him, that are doing further damage to our Republic. And adding them to the list of those to be purged.
"Say what you want, The Orange has made it to the top. A perfect role model for schoolyard bullies everywhere."
Yeah. I've read that the Biff Tannen character in Back to the Future was based on (younger) Trump. "About as useful as a screen door on a ... submarine".
But I have a question. Trump does indeed talk like an idiot, and this particular self-contradictory nonsense is therefore no surprise. He either has a terrible memory or he lies so much that he's really just puking up whatever is in his head at any given moment.
Has he always been like this? I mean, yes, I know he's always been a pathological liar—there are enough stories of the pretence and deceit from his NY real estate days—but as he always been so wildly inconsistent? Have his memory and reasoning power always been this bad?
Because if any other 70+ fella spoke the way he does ... they'd be off for dementia testing pronto.
Yeah. While Reagan, for example, was a very quick-witted guy (see for example his career in sports announcing, where he'd invent play-by-play details in real time to match a ticker feed of game events) and a serious policy wonk earlier in his career, who slipped further and further into dementia during his time in office, Trump was a not-very-bright schoolyard bully who's now fallen from that not at all lofty height.
Of course cognitively-impaired presidents are not so uncommon. Edith Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt were both probably de facto president for the ends of their husbands' final terms, and those are just the most notable cases of presidents who were incapacitated but didn't leave office.
@CoC:
I'll agree that different != better. However, his perception of better is quite clearly enveloped by his fog of existance, which as far as I can tell is made up of steam from the fryer of golden potatoes, a haze of oil from the brothers K, gas from his own farts, and quite possibly Melania's bottle of Goop sourced vaginal egg perfume.
Trump is more a symptom of a problem than the problem itself. Once he got the ball rolling with the whole "USA #1" thing and sanctioning every man + dog, embargoing everyone and generally acting like a tinpot dictator there were any number of other Americans who would not only be only too pleased to implement what the Fuhrer ordered but would be falling over themselves to out-patriotic him. Its the classic "sow a wind, reap a whirlwind" situation. Now the ball's well and truly rolling and there are now careers riding on this stuff Trump's started to learn a very important rule of government -- once you create a bureaucracy then its the very devil to get rid of it. So now we've got a situation where inemperate pandering to a few insiders and lobbyists have caused tangible damage to the US semiconductor industry, much of which is easily replacable (since its offshored anyway).
The only way forward for many companies is to move more of their operations out of the US. At least, its the only safe way to proceed -- anything else is risking the farm on whatever whim or prejudice an administration has at that moment. Its not as if anyone didn't see this coming....
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