But, if you had an amazing reputation for paying your debts, and get super low interest rates because of it, and all of a sudden you change your reputation and demand for holding your debt and currency goes down, well, then that's created a massive problem for the currency that reduces everyone's quality of life drastically.
All oil is global commodity and the US refineries can’t take the oil that the US produces. So they mix it with heavy sours from Canada so the refineries can handle them. So a lot of the oil in the US is dependent on foreign oil as you said.
I don't think you understand how commodity markets work, in particular oil, which is easy to ship relative to extraction costs.
It literally doesn't matter where the oil comes from, it only matters how much gets shipped! Only an utter fool could say something like "closing off the strait of Hormuz doesn't matter because our oil doesn't come from there." One merely has to look at current US gas prices to see how utterly silly that notion is!
> One merely has to look at current US gas prices to see how utterly silly that notion is!
We could probably slash gas prices by banning oil exports, thus removing domestic oil supply from global market pricing (barring smuggling). The oil industry would probably hate that, though, for obvious reasons.
Ultimately, though, this is yet another wakeup call for why an economy and society built around lighting a finite resource on fire is a bad idea, and hopefully this time around that wakeup call sticks.
> We could probably slash gas prices by banning oil exports, thus removing domestic oil supply from global market pricing (barring smuggling).
To my understanding, you couldn't do this, no. The US is a net oil exporter, but many of its refineries are tuned for processing oil with a chemical composition that isn't found in the US, or not found in sufficient quantity. So the US has to both import and export oil, it can't just replace imports with exports.
I'm still reviewing all the code that's created, and asking for modifications, and basically using LLMs as a 2000 wpm typist, and seeing similar productivity gains. Especially in new frameworks! Everything is test driven development, super clean and super fast.
The challenge now is how to plan architectures and codebases to get really big and really scale, without AI slop creating hidden tech debt.
Foundations of the code must be very solid, and the architecture from the start has to be right. But even redoing the architecture becomes so much faster now...
> CC is a better implementation and seems to be fairly economic with token usage. That is the really the only defining point and, I suspect, Anthropic are going to have a lot of trouble staying relevant with all the product issues.
What are you using to drive the Chinese models in order to evaluate this? OpenCode?
Some of Claude Code's features, like remote sessions, are far more important than the underlying model for my productivity.
Yes, 100% agree. OpenHands has self-hosted, KiloCode and RooCode both have a cloud option. I don't think you are able to pass a session around with any of them. Codex seems to have comparable features afaik.
CC tool usage is also significantly ahead imo (doesn't negate the price but it is something). I have seen issues with heavy thinking models (like Minimax) and client implementations with poor tool usage (like Cline).
CC has had a period over the last six months of delivering significant value...but, of course, you can just use CC with OpenRouter.
I'm not so sure of that opinion on reproducibility. The last peer review I did was for a small journal that explicitly does not evaluate for high scientific significance, merely for correctness, which generally means straightforward acceptance. The other two reviews were positive, as was mine, except I said that the methods need to be described more and ideally the code placed somewhere. That was enough for a complete rejection of the paper, without asking for the simple revisions I requested. It was a very serious action taken merely because I requested better reproducibility!
(Personally I think the lack of reproducibility comes back mostly to peer reviewers that haven't thought through enough about the steps they'd need to take to reproduce, and instead focus on the results...)
Eh, I'm not so sure about the funding side there, researchers are not really caught at all and are fully responsible, IMHO. Peer reviewers exist to enforce community standards, and are not influenced to avoid reproducibility concerns by funding sources. The results are always more interesting than reproducibility, of course, and I think that's why the get the attention! Also, there needs to be greater involvement of grad students (who do most of the actual work) in peer review, IMHO, because most PIs spend their day in meetings reviewing results, setting directions, writing grants, and have little time for actual lab work, and are thus disconnected from it.
There needs to be more public naming and shaming in science social media and in conference talks, but especially when there are social gatherings at conferences and people are able to gossip. There was a bit of this with Google's various papers, as they got away with figurative murder on lack of reproducibility for commercial purposes. But eventually Google did share more.
Most journals have standards for depositing expensive datasets, but that's a clear yes/no answer. Reproducibility is a very subjective question in comparison to data deposition, and must be subjectively evaluated by peer reviewers. I'd like to see more peer review guidelines with explicit check boxes for various aspects of reproducibility.
> Reproducibility is a very subjective question in comparison to data deposition
Yeah I can definitely see why this is the case because it isn’t real until someone actually tries to reproduce the results. At that point it leaves the realm of subjectivity and becomes a question of cost.
The people of the US were converted into functional Putin-subservient Russians for the last election, and the media environment is not getting better, and in fact seems to be getting much worse.
However there is revolt amongst a good chunk of the fractured coalition that barely brought Trump into office.
Trump's Epstein coverup and sheltering of Ghislaine Maxwell took off the shine with a large number of people. The ghastly behavior around the deaths of major figures takes off more. Exempting producers of the pesticide glyphosate has taken off most of the MAHA coalition. And then, of course the wars, when he promised not to launch any and accused his opponent of doing exactly what he's currently doing...
It remains to be seen just how permanent this is, and whether the post-Trump US can be reattached to reality instead of reality TV, but I use hope.
Unfortunately that leaves us with the Democrats who have shown time and again that they are unwilling or unable to confront this movement for what it is.
I'm frankly far more concerned that the Republicans lose next election, and we get Democrats in power who then prioritize "getting back to normal" and once again utterly failing to hold accountable the utter BUFFET of mediocre wannabe dictators who brought us to the brink already.
I also hope. But I'd be lying if I said I thought it was rational.
The real fear is that they don't solve any of the problems that caused this in the first place... it's not about some vindictive punishment, it's about solving the problem.
I beg to differ, as I see it, it's both. Solving the problem necessarily entails punishing the malicious actors attempting to subvert and demolish our governance, justice system, society and way of life. Allowing Jan 6th to go unpunished at the highest levels was a key factor in what brought us here.
> demolish our governance, justice system, society and way of life
"Our" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. There were many "ours" whose ways of life, governance, and society were destroyed on the road to making the Jan 6th thing possible..
>The people of the US were converted into functional Putin-subservient Russians
It's crazy that you continue to push this narrative despite the entire "Russia-Gate" thing turning out to total bullshit oppo followed by Trump being currently at war with one of Putin's allies and having jailed another.
The evidence supporting this claim is what, he wasn't nice to Zelenskyy that one time (despite still financially supporting Ukraine in their war against Russia)?
Well they'd have to lose a huge percentage of people for this not to be profitable quarter over quarter. But it likely cuts in to future growth substantially.
And with what seems to now be an unavoidable economic storm as in-transit tankers dock and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz starts to be felt, there might be a larger than normal amount of people looking to cut costs in the coming year.
Or maybe not, people seem to have stopped responding to economic pressure by cutting costs in the US! When vacations got super expensive, people still spent, and increased their complaining. We will see what happens in 2026.
Netflix, cable, etc. and other at home subscriptions tend to be the last things cut because people generally stay home more when the economy is bad so they want their in-home entertainment.
Netflix is more resilient to economic downturns than you'd think. For many people it's a higher ROI for entertainment when compared to a lot of other alternatives. e.g going to bars / restaurants / movie theaters.
But, if you had an amazing reputation for paying your debts, and get super low interest rates because of it, and all of a sudden you change your reputation and demand for holding your debt and currency goes down, well, then that's created a massive problem for the currency that reduces everyone's quality of life drastically.
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