[__MatrixMan__]

It's clear that the idiot does favors for the highest bidders. If you follow that money it points you, in various ways, to the AI companies.

Who would have an incentive to tax physical goods entering and exiting the country? Somebody who is competing for investment dollars and whose product is digital.

Who benefits from immigration overreach? People whose products are especially relevant to mass surveillance.

Dismantling the US biomedical superiority and our public health endeavors might've been Trump's idea, but it happened in a room full of people who sell capabilities related to convincing a nation full of sick people that there's nothing untoward happening to them.

The market is controlled by AI companies right now, and Trump is letting the market have its way with us, therefore the AI companies are having their way with us. This is what happens when you abandon antitrust efforts and end up with companies that are too powerful for the government to regulate: they end up running things. It's the robber barron's era all over again. You can't absolve them of responsibility just because the president is OK with it.

And that's what the moat is made of. There will be opportunity costs associated with putting everything you've got into datacenters, and those are costs that most governments are too competent to be tricked into paying.

[yalogin]

Yes I wasn’t questioning that the market and government is controlled by the AI companies. What I am saying is that cannot be a moat. If anything it will be an anchor that will pull these companies down. If anything that is a signal that they don’t have a moat

[__MatrixMan__]

If the scale necessary to get the job done cannot be achieved without a corrupt government in your pocket--somebody to drag people out of town hall meetings and ensure that the infrastructure gets built regardless of consequence--and your competition in another country can't influence their government to do the same thing (and that government itself doesn't care to do so), that functions as a moat, doesn't it?

It's not a new dynamic. The US lets companies do all kinds of things to its citizens re: privacy or the environment or disinformation... things that would be illegal in other countries. It's the American trade-off and although I don't appreciate the explosive diarrhea angle to it, it does give American businesses some protection against foreign competition.