Taxes. The EU introduced rules of tax transparency. The UK left the EU the day before the rules kicked in.

That’s how most EU regulations are created. They take the best parts of the legislation of various members and combine them.

As for weapons, harmonisation is a thing. However, the exact use cases will vary for different countries. A tank that’s optimal for Spain isn’t necessarily the best for Germany. Neither country wants suboptimal equipment. What is easier to harmonise is ammo, a fact that NATO have been exploiting for a long while.

There are also the implications. Before now, military has been done on a per country basis. If they want to move as a block, they need individual countries to step up. It also allows countries to act independently if desired. A unified army is seen as a threat to the sovereignty of individual countries.

I’ve noticed 2 types on this, stick-in-the-muds and peak-hunters.

Stick in the muds latch on to the first version of a belief they encounter properly. They will stubbornly hang on to that for as long as possible.

Peak hunters are the opposite, they will rapidly change beliefs to maximise the results/find truth.

Interestingly, after some time, the 2 groups look almost identical. The peak hunters tend to find the ‘best’ version of their belief, based on their existing memeplex. To budge them, you need to show a different belief is better, on their rankings (not yours). This is hard when they have already maximised it. Without knowing how they are weighing things, they can look like stick in the muds.

The biggest tell is to question why they believe what they do. If they have a reasonably comprehensive answer, they are likely peak hunters. Stick in the muds generally can’t articulate why their belief is better, outside of common sound bites.

This is textbook toxic masculinity.

A lot of people misuse the term, but this is an excellent example. The men involved lose out on something amazing due to it being ‘unmanly’.

On the global stage, America doesn’t have a centralist party. It has a right party and an extreme right party.

For comparison, the UK is relatively right leaning. The democrats are comparable to the UK conservative party. They are the most right leaning ‘main’ party.

It’s also worth noting that he fell on his own sword, politically. He knew that Briton needed a strong leader, with the people unified behind them. Churchill could do this, he couldn’t. He took the blame to keep the rest of the party clean.

Imagine widgets are $10 in country A, but a company in country B can make and sell them for $8. Buyers are likely to buy the cheapest (all else being equal). A 100% tariff would turn $8 into $16. Company B still only gets $8, but they now look far more expensive to customers in country A.

They are designed to price out external competitors to local companies. This can be used to protect industries. Steel is a good example. China can make steel far cheaper than the rest of the world. However, steel plants take a long time to build and get producing. You generally don’t want a potential rival to have control of the materials you need for war production.

Another legit use is to account for local regulations. If you require local companies to pay in a carbon credit system, an external company could undercut them from abroad. A tariff would help level the playing field.

None of these apply to what trump is doing. He’s swinging a claymore mine around like a toy hammer. It causes huge damage to all involved.

The film hot fuzz has an amazing take on this. They need to talk to a farmer, but end up bringing the dog handler along. It turns out it’s not for the dog. It takes 2 accent translations to make sense of what he is saying!

https://youtu.be/Cun-LZvOTdw

I had a Welsh work colleague years ago. A few times he was on the phone and spoke Welsh. None of the mental markers on what language he was speaking seemed to change. It sounded like English, spoken with a Welsh accent. Until my brain tried to interpret it. It was like I had had a stroke. It parsed as English, but wouldn’t make sense. It took a conscious effort to remind myself that he wasn’t speaking English.

More like he pivoted to the money when his scientific work was dismantled.

At the time he was selling a vaccination. He was willing to throw (autistic) children under the bus to make more money off of it. The fact he was then willing to jump on the anti Vax train doesn’t surprise me.

Wakefield wasn’t anti Vax. He was against the MMR jab specifically. He was also invested in one of the alternative vaccines, and faked data to make money.

His (false) message got garbled crossing the pond, and gained traction in America as a general anti Vax movement.

There is also the fact that European armies rarely sat idle. If they existed, they were often deployed against each other.

Hopefully the last 75 years of peace has broken that cycle. Most European nations focused on tactical capabilities, over strategic ones, letting America play hammer to their scalpels. If Europe builds an full military then finding the balance between individual and federation armies will be the challenge.

We left the union (an action I fought hard against). We are still part of Europe (geographically ) however.

We need a system with “regression to the mean” built in.

Savvy investing, business and hard work should get you ahead. The key is that it should be taxed enough and in a way that, unless your children are also exceptional, the generational wealth will tend back towards the average. The same applies from the bottom. Someone from a poor background should be able to pull themselves back up, if their work ethic etc is appropriate.

Right now we have run away in both directions. Wealth begets more wealth, and poverty begets more poverty.

As an Englishman, I’m still cursing the puppets who voted leave. It was mostly based on lies and half truths. A lot of us want back in to Europe. We just need to figure out how to clean house and make sure people understand what we are (re)gaining.

In the world that’s coming, we need to stand as a united front.

That makes me nervous as well. Hopefully, there are enough people involved to know not to kill the golden goose for a quick buck.

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Ultimately it’s a slow and steady strategy. There goal is long term profitability, not short term gains. In the long term, the best strategy is not to piss off your customers.

The advantage of this is that it can snowball to impressive levels. At least until a exec with more education than brains does a pump and run on it. A mistake steam seems to know to avoid.

He’s doing the equivalent of robbing a bank while wearing a suicide bomb vest. The only difference is that he’s threatening the world economy instead.

The fact that he hasn’t thought through the consequence chain afterwards is just him being stupid. Akin to a robber trying to pay the stolen money into his bank account, at the branch he robbed a few days before.

That doesn’t help against hardware thermal runaway. The pi would overheat its own ram chips and hard lock up. A simple power cycle fixed it.