It's China, Cuba needs $8-10 billion USD, money that China isn't that eager to put into Cuba, but Trump's constant warmongering against Cuba has given China the opportunity to put a bunch of spy stations on the island.
Yes, the question is how reliable those claims are.
Cuba doesn't have a lot of foreign currency, but it does have a lot of cheap labor, often shockingly skilled labor. Boiling it down to a cost in dollars may not be easy, let alone saying "China won't spend that".
Yes, China is already spending so much in much less developed/educated places, seemingly just for "goodwill" or at least to be in a good place once the US hegemony falls. The only reason they wouldn't do it in Cuba would be to avoid needlessly provoking the US, but I think they have a good excuse now (clearly US is the provocateur, they're only restoring some semblance of balance in the longer term).
>Trump's constant warmongering against Cuba has given China the opportunity to put a bunch of spy stations on the island.
These kinds of claims would really benefit from additional information regarding the nature of such spy stations. What would they do and why? I don't think Cuba is exactly a top tier sigint location.
You'd be surprised at the benefits of something as mundane as proximity in espionage. Especially for a country like China or Russia which is very far away from mainland USA. Tracking troop movements at lower latency, tracking comms on unsecured networks, monitoring satellite launches happening from Florida, etc.
By painting Trump's actions as rational developments. By putting his words on equal standing as any prior president's.
Look at the headline here for instance - US and Iran send conflicting signals, as though both parties are sending incorrect messaging regarding a potential peace deal.
What's really happening though is Trump unilaterally lying through his teeth (established), perhaps so that entities tied to him, likely his erstwhile bankrupt family, can manipulate the stock market (speculative). Of course, you won't see the NY Times or any American paper of record narrate the news that way. That's what GP means by the NYT's sanewashing. Because for them, any news sells, and you don't cut off the source.
While Blackstone and other PE firms are involved in buying those assets directly (part of my old job), Blackrock is also indirectly involved by buying up massive portions of the REITs listed by these firms, which validated the business in the first place. Without the extremely insane amounts of money pumped by Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street into these structures, all for some measly 4-5% return (laughable for most sophisticated investors but apparently good enough for these guys), they were able to put the accelerant to the fire. Neither BX nor any other PE firm would be doing this model if a market didn't exist for it.
While I'm obviously biased here, imo Blackstone is much better still because you don't see Steve Schwarzman go around pontificating while using the voting rights of passive investors to force certain behaviors upon the boards of nearly every company.
Iran already knows his bluff. Abbas Aragchi even explicitly mentioned this in an interview, stating that negotiating with the US is a pointless exercise, but it tells the Iranians whether Dump is planning a major strike. So there's definitely going to be a major strike happening by Friday or Saturday.
To end the war, Iran will demand a full withdrawal of US forces from all neighboring countries as well as a shut down of US bases. This will also have the added benefit of giving them full control of the strait when the US leaves, and a free hand to bombard Israel. The GCC are already fatigued from a war they had no say in, so if the Iranians strike the desal plants, they will either join the US offensive or they'll kick the American troops out.
Non-zionist Jews have been leaving Israel whenever the opportunity rose. This war was just an accelerant for further emigration.
The only ones who choose to stay back are folks fresh into Aliyah, who might've received a lot of incentives from the government to settle in the illegal West Bank settlements. Or those who really believe in Zionism. The former are typically guys who couldn't make the cut even in their home countries, so they're certainly not adequate replacements for the ones leaving.
Not to mention, it's mostly the liberal cities like Tel Aviv which have faced the brunt of Iranian barrages. Jerusalem has been barely hit. Folks staying in those cities, working actual jobs contributing to the economy and not Torah studies, are likely the ones leaving - I know many of my acquaintances who've left Tel Aviv for the US or Dubai.
> It seems like AI is not reducing that percentage - possibly increasing it.
AI is definitely increasing it. I barely type out any code now, and simply sit back and review what Claude dumps out. Even if it's a minor UI change, I just request the LLM and it executes the change for me. Thankfully I don't write code for my day-job anymore and mostly just sit in my office and pontificate :). I know my code skills and inclination to write code have atrophied to an extent, thanks to AI. Currently what I'm able to do with AI far surpasses the capabilities of what I was able to do without relying on AI.
Now if my employees were relying on LLMs to do their coding for them, I would be very disappointed. And I think that that limited space in algorithmic and HFT trading is where exceptionally talented programmers will find room in, leaving the others to dry out and wither.
Perhaps the best example of frogs in a boiling pot are all these folks in frontier AI companies themselves who are building the blocks for the very things that are going to replace them, if not already. Maybe they'll make off like bandits before their work gets adversely affected, or maybe not.
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