> Scientists who might have come to the US three years ago have little reason to do so now.

Been saying that about EU and China for decades now.

Yet the top European and Chinese still come to the US. Even in April 2026.

> Let's see how long it takes before the big US AI companies start lobbying to outright ban use of Chinese AI, even the open source / local models. For "national security" reasons, of course.

Already do on EVs.

..and drones https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-updates-covered-list-add-ce...

> The US supports the genocide in Gaza, it supports the bombing of Lebanon. The US itself has now started (another) war and bombed Iran.

> With Trump they are now openly hostile to European democracies, and ICE and doing their best at repression within the US.

And what is Europe going to do about it?

Boycott ChatGPT and Claude? Ha.

That isn't really the point though, of course the UK can't stop these things by itself.

The point is US "soft power" is eroding incredibly rapidly and this will have consequences

europe+canada put out the threat, and succeeded just by threatening.

if you missed it thats on you

> People have been convinced of that my entire life, and I'm old now.

People in the UK still think they are the #1 superpower today

> It has more to do with gold is now worth almost 3x what it was 2 years ago.

And why is it worth 3x?

But S&P500 is not?

SP500 is linked to profits. Gold is purely speculative.

lol you conveniently left out 50% of the ticket fees

$600/pax (which I disclosed) is hardly 50% of the ticket fees, which were, as I mentioned, $3500/pax or so otherwise.

your 70k points + $600/pax is equivalent to $1300

so $600 fees is 46% of the points + cash you paid

you could've cashed out 70k points as $700, therefore the 70k points becomes cash in the math

OK, so you've calculated I've saved $2200/pax. Fine.

For the record, I already took that into account. My goal with these flights was to save cash, because at the moment, cash flow is the issue I'm solving for. At other times, I have other priorities.

I can't believe I have to say this, but... YMMV, I guess.

> what profits are you talking about to offset the losses?

You don’t need profit to offset the losses.

You can simply reduce spending / expenses.

In principle yes, but all metrics so far suggest they are losing money every user interaction. There is very little network effect with these tools so It's not like they can start cutting back on staff and feature deployment.

lol that’s a line so incredibly naive it hurts.

One does not “simply” reduce spending.

> One does not “simply” reduce spending.

Why does stock price go up after mass layoffs?

What happens when the only way to reduce spending is to reduce your assets? Seems like circular logic at that point. I suppose the market isn’t expected to be rational all the time, but eventually it is.

By your logic any company should just layoff everyone and profit on the stock price going to the infinity.

Company would no longer function of course but why it would matters if the stock price is through the Moon?

> When it becomes a bigger problem, other indices with higher quality controls will out compete the current ones and be used by asset managers seeking safety

Doubt it.

The world does not allow perfect competition.

> world does not allow perfect competition

What does this have to do with anything?

Plenty of asset managers construct indices to save fees.