I watched the entire press conference with Zelensky. There was 40 minutes of discussion up to the argument. Most people saw at most the last ten minutes. The whole video gives the proper context.
When I first watched the argument without the proper context, I thought it was possible that Trump and Vance ambushed Zelensky or were even trying to humiliate him. That's not what happened.
You had 40 minutes of calm conversation. Vance made a point that didn't attack Zelensky and wasn't even addressed to him, and Zelensky clearly started the argument.
In the first 40 minutes, Zelensky kept trying to go beyond what was negotiated in the deal. When Trump was asked a question, it was always "we'll see." Zelensky made blanket assertions that there would be no negotiating with Putin, and that Russia would pay for the war. When Trump said that it was a tragedy that people on both sides were dying, Zelensky interjected that the Russians were the invaders.
For his part, Trump made clear that the US would continue delivering military aid. All Zelensky had to do was remain calm for a few more minutes and they would've signed a deal.
The argument started when Trump pointed out that it would be hard to make a deal if you talk about Putin the way Zelensky does. Vance interjects to make the reasonable point that Biden called Putin names and that didn't get us anywhere.
The Zelensky/Trump dynamic was calm and stable. It was when Vance spoke that Zelensky started to interrogate him. Throughout the press conference to that point, everyone was making their arguments directly to the audience. Zelensky decided to challenge Vance and ask him hostile questions. He went back to his point that Putin never sticks to ceasefires, once again implying that negotiations are pointless. Why on earth would you do this? Then came the fight we all saw.
Zelensky was minutes away from being home free, and he would have had the deal and new commitments from the Trump administration. The point Vance made was directed against Biden and the media, taking them to task for speaking in moralistic terms. This offended Zelensky, and that began the argument.
I've been a fan of Zelensky up to this point, but this showed so much incompetence, if not emotional instability, that I don't see how he recovers from this. The relationship with the administration is broken. Ukraine should probably go with new leadership at this point.
the way I read what you wrote, it seems like you think Zelensky's argument is bad and purely emotionally motivated, but the fact that Putin/Russia has broken agreements and ceasefires is a very valid concern, isn't it?
if the conference had ended without argument but behind the scenes Trump/Vance were setting up negotiations that go against Ukraine's interest, that would not have been a "win" for Zelensky other than in terms of a contest of popularity - but only the popularity among westerners who have no real personal stake in the conflict. it's Ukrainians and Russians who are dying on the front lines.
Like you, I watched the full hour. I had the same analysis.
There are no winners from an exchange like this. Trump and Vance come across as bullies. Zelenskyy comes across as needlessly argumentative. Trump and Zelenskyy both come across as quick to anger. Not a good look for any of them.
Maybe Zelensky had a very thin path out after Vance's provocations, but even the language accents are partly to blame for miscommunication/crosstalk, so maybe for Zelensky it was a Kobayashi Maru situation.
They invited him to the White House to finally sign the rare earth minerals agreement, which he had said he'd sign and then renegged two times prior[0]. This was the third attempt by the US to get it signed. During the meeting, he indicated that he would sign the agreement but then not agree to a cease fire, which was the whole point of putting it in place. Naturally, this was a deal breaker for the administration and the meeting ended.
Here's a thought process: Dad was trying to make sense of things that did not make sense to him. These things that did not make sense to him were seen by him as ultimately dangerous, even to his own family. That compelled him to seek to find the truth about whether they are real threats. Along that journey, he became convinced that they were in fact real. He sought out the long term implications and those implications became his 10 predictions.
As a concrete example, he heard there was massive illegal immigration into the US. His first encounter with this information could have come from many places, Fox news, a Republican senator, RFK Jr.'s report from the border, or a story in the New York Post. He wondered, is it true or not that millions of people entered the US through the southern border, and, that this had been happening for many years? Was it also true that there was a fleet of 'NGOs' that were providing aid to these millions of people as they made there way to the US? Was it also true that these people were being further aided and extorted by cartel membership along the way? Was it also true that hundreds of thousands of children were 'missing'? Finally, was it true that the US was funding logistics to fly hundreds of thousands of Haitians into the US?
There is information on both sides of these questions. Plenty of accounts on X have information that it's all happening, and worse. But those who would know with authority, like Secretary Mayorkas, President Biden and VP Harris conclusively stated it was not happening at all.
Dad's sources from his investigation led him to believe there was a preponderance of truth. The son's that there was not, (presuming that he did an investigation). It's too bad that the different opinion became a wedge between them.
I am confident that most disagreements among people are an outcome of their differing sources of information during their lifetime. It's self-evident, but if they endeavoured to agree on what was true and what was not true first before developing opinions about those truths, the schism can largely be averted.
I remember seeing interviews with Nortel's CEO where he bragged that most internet backbone traffic was handled by Nortel hardware. Things didn't quite work out how he thought they were going to work out.
I think Nvidia is better positioned than Cisco or Nortel were during the dotcom crash, but does anyone actually think Nvidia's current performance is sustainable? It doesn't seem realistic to believe that.
People who fought in WW1, thought WW2 would be similar. Especially on the winning side.
There is no specific reason to assume that AI will be similar to the dotcom boom/bust. AI may just as easily be like the introduction of the steam engine at the start of the industrial revolution, just sped up.
Indeed, but a lot of railroad startups went out of business because their capital investments far exceeded the revenue growth and they went bankrupt. I'd bet the same for AM radio companies in the 1920s. When new technologies create attractive business opportunities, there frequently is an initial overinvestment. The billions pouring into AI far exceeds what went into .COM, and much of it will return pennies. The investors who win are the ones who can pick the B&Os, RCAs and GOOGs out of the flock before everyone else.[0]
[0] "Planning and construction of railroads in the United States progressed rapidly and haphazardly, without direction or supervision from the states that granted charters to construct them. Before 1840 most surveys were made for short passenger lines which proved to be financially unprofitable. Because steam-powered railroads had stiff competition from canal companies, many partially completed lines were abandoned."
> Indeed, but a lot of railroad startups went out of business because their capital investments far exceeded the revenue growth and they went bankrupt
That was similar to what happened during the dotcom bubble.
The difference this time, is that most of the funding comes from companies with huge profit margins. As long as the leadership in Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon (not to mention Elon) believes that AI is coming soon, there will be funding.
Obviously, most startups will fail. But even if 19 fail and 1 succeed, if you invest in all, you're likely to make money.
If the bubble pops, would that bring the price for at least part of that hardware down and thus enable a second round of players (who were locked out from the race now) to experiment a little bit more and perhaps find something that works better?
My outsider observation is that we have a decent number of players roughly tied at trying to produce a better model. OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Stability AI, Google, Meta, xAI, A12, Amazon, IBM, Nvidia, Alibaba, Databricks, some universities, a few internal proprietary models (Bloomberg, etc) .. and a bunch of smaller/lesser players I am forgetting.
To me, the actual challenge seems to be figuring out monetizing.
Not sure the 15th, 20th, 30th LLM model from lesser capitalized players is going to be as impactful.
It might be as simple as the regional options that middle-American households can afford have decreased. For example, in 1990, the median home price in California was 10x the median household income in West Virginia. Today, the gap has increased to 16x. Meaning that even fewer West Virginian households can include California as an option to move to as 25 years ago.
These people you propose are renters, not buyers. I don't entirely discount the impact of CoL differences (moving to California is pretty annoying from that perspective, and I've done it twice), but it's not the barrier you're suggesting.
Would be cool if the article would explain Musk's reasoning for the support. 'Us rich guys gotta stick together.' isn't much of an analysis. Trump is anti union? As I understand it, Trump is not anti-union. He worked effectively with unions in New York for decades. But he seems to be anti union leadership.
I think on this one he's wearing it on his sleeve and I take his motivation at face value. If you want to know why, he tells you why on his twitter all the time.
Musk's desperate for attention, would be my suspicion. Every time he's out of the news, he does something weird. This gets him in the news, ego it is desirable. I'm not sure you _really_ have to go looking for more complex motives than that.
The NLRB has ruled that Tesla broke the law by barring factory workers in California from wearing union T-shirts and when CEO Elon Musk tweeted that employees would lose their stock options in the company if they unionized.
I'm not sure that is realistic anymore. The run of free money is over and I expected that markets are going to be very picky compared to a few years ago
I must have missed the memo. Where could I get the free money? "a few years ago" we had a global pandemic. Are you claiming that markets will be very picky compared to that time?
When I first watched the argument without the proper context, I thought it was possible that Trump and Vance ambushed Zelensky or were even trying to humiliate him. That's not what happened.
You had 40 minutes of calm conversation. Vance made a point that didn't attack Zelensky and wasn't even addressed to him, and Zelensky clearly started the argument.
In the first 40 minutes, Zelensky kept trying to go beyond what was negotiated in the deal. When Trump was asked a question, it was always "we'll see." Zelensky made blanket assertions that there would be no negotiating with Putin, and that Russia would pay for the war. When Trump said that it was a tragedy that people on both sides were dying, Zelensky interjected that the Russians were the invaders.
For his part, Trump made clear that the US would continue delivering military aid. All Zelensky had to do was remain calm for a few more minutes and they would've signed a deal.
The argument started when Trump pointed out that it would be hard to make a deal if you talk about Putin the way Zelensky does. Vance interjects to make the reasonable point that Biden called Putin names and that didn't get us anywhere.
The Zelensky/Trump dynamic was calm and stable. It was when Vance spoke that Zelensky started to interrogate him. Throughout the press conference to that point, everyone was making their arguments directly to the audience. Zelensky decided to challenge Vance and ask him hostile questions. He went back to his point that Putin never sticks to ceasefires, once again implying that negotiations are pointless. Why on earth would you do this? Then came the fight we all saw.
Zelensky was minutes away from being home free, and he would have had the deal and new commitments from the Trump administration. The point Vance made was directed against Biden and the media, taking them to task for speaking in moralistic terms. This offended Zelensky, and that began the argument.
I've been a fan of Zelensky up to this point, but this showed so much incompetence, if not emotional instability, that I don't see how he recovers from this. The relationship with the administration is broken. Ukraine should probably go with new leadership at this point.