I think Macron is incredibly smart to be investing in STEM in France. There are plenty of very intelligent and successful French people in the US who are very unhappy with the direction of the US, attracting that talent home will serve them well.
Given that it includes health care, education, and a ton of vacation, yeah, they will find that they lead a much better life.
The goal isn't to maximize the number. The goal is to lead a good life. The number can help with that, but not if you focus on it to the exclusion of the things that matter.
I mean, to be fair there is nothing but shallow content available considering it's all stochastic responses that are incredibly difficult to actually measure and make real scientific inferences about. Until that changes I think it's going to be constant slop about optimization.
Can someone help me understand the argument that the FTC blocking the merger was bad?
The argument I have seen is that blocking it resulted in Spirit dying and people losing their jobs and there being less competition.
Wouldn’t the same exact thing have happened regardless? Am i supposed to believe that Jet Blue would have kept all of those employees? There would be one less competitor anyway, and in the merger case they’re even more powerful now meaning competing is harder.
It seems to me it’s just that creditors want to be paid out by a merger rather than paid our for cents on the dollar when it died on it’s own.
JetBlue is a small rival (JetBlue at ~5% of US traffic, Spirit at ~3%) to the big 4 United/American/Southwest/Delta (each with ~17%). At least on the surface, a larger JetBlue might be more competitive rather than forcing them into the unequal partnerships like they have with United at the moment.
Certainly, some jobs would be lost, but I do think that Spirit dying is a worse outcome than joining another small airline.
The straw that broke the camel's back is the fuel spike due to the Iran War. That drained the remaining liquidity.
No idea if the extra time "normal" fuel prices would have allowed Spirit to find a way to stay afloat, but the fuel price spike stole any time they had to figure it out.
Uhh yes? The country has been blockaded from receiving fuel. While there could be a more clever attack, the overt one is enough to do all of the damage.
The country has categorically not been blockaded. A blockade is an act of war where a country prevents all trade regardless of origin.
Cuba has been embargoed which prevents US owned businesses, as well as any businesses which operate in the US, from trading with it. An embargo is not an act of war, it's a way for market economies to apply economic pressure using their soft power. It's not enforced by the military away from the territory of the country placing the embargo and is instead enforced domestically using the police.
Large oil-producing countries that traded with Cuba include Venezuela, Russia (the USSR before 1990), China, and Iran. Market democracies are all pretty OK with the embargo, because trade with a country that doesn't recognize property rights is inherently fraught.
Of those countries, only China remains relatively unencumbered and they've limited exports for internal reasons. There were also a few other source countries like Mexico, Brazil, and Algeria. Algeria stopped years ago because of internal issues. Mexico and Brazil stopped after pressure from the US. That leaves Cuba's domestic production, which is limited to begin with and can't be refined in any sufficient quantity.
Use whatever word you want to use to describe the situation, but the practical result strongly resembles a blockade.
> Of those countries, only China remains relatively unencumbered and they've limited exports for internal reasons.
Yeah, only China remains unencumbered because only China didn't collapse under the weight of an absurd ideology and crushingly oppressive government. Thanks to Xi's heavyhanded interventions and reassertion of state control, they're trending the wrong way.
The USSR couldn't compete with the free world and collapsed. Venezuela had been shedding refugees for decades before Trump abducted the pro-Havana regime. Iran murdered 30,000 protestors in the streets before the US started bombing it. No matter how you slice it, Cuba had decades of steady imports from friendly nations and yet has remained poor and underdeveloped because of its economic model. No amount of trained doctors or public healthcare can compete with the fact that, until recently, it was illegal to start a business on the island.
If we rewind to 2015 before Trump ever took office, none of these were different. All of those countries were flimsy states and unreliable trading partners, and Cuba routinely dealt with famines and shortages. American pressure doesn't help, but even if the US hadn't embargoed Cuba when the revolution happened it would still have been forced to embargo it afterwards when the Cuban government started launching into its anti-US foreign interventions (there's a fascinating Wikipedia rabbit hole there, if you're bored).
I will use words to describe the situation that actually describe the situation. Cuba sucks at trade because it has been continuously alienating its largest neighbor and blocking domestic industry from forming since the revolution.
Mind you, the US even supported the Cuban Revolution against Batista (despite supporting him for decades). That lasted until the revolutionary government started seizing American holdings and executing landlords.
The history of the two countries is complicated and it does both of them a disservice to pretend like this is a black-and-white "evil imperialist US embargoes a fledgling, innocent socialist Republic."
I'm not sure where in my comment you read any positive statements about Cuba, but I assure you they're not present. I'm only saying that the situation created by the US this year is little different in practice from the effects of actions you would call a blockade.
I use mistral-medium-3.1 for a lot of random daily tasks, along with the vibe cli. I'd state from my personal opinion that mistral is my preferred 'model vendor' by far at this point. They're extremely consistent between releases while each of them just feels better. I also have a strong personal preference to the output.
I actively use gemini-3.1-pro-preview, claude-4.6-opus-high, and gpt-5.3-codex as well. I prefer them all for different reasons, however I usually _start_ with mistral if it's an option.
MOE but 120B range. Man I wish it was an 80B. I have 2 GPUs with 62Gib of usable VRAM. A 4bit 80B gives me some context window, but 120B puts me into system RAM
I hope so but I am less optimistic. The oligarchy in Russia who remained loyal to the Putin regime have done just fine for decades as long as they did not attempt to overthrow the dictator. The regime in Washington is basically constructing the same type of kleptocracy and very little evidence is there that anyone who matters will get in their way. So far as I can tell the country is already a form of authoritarian regime where the loyalty to the supreme ruler is the main parameter of conducting business there.
Mate, the entire political class around the world is involved. The fact that you focus on “socialists” which Chomsky is not, says more about your commitment to ideology than anything else.
