I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that's college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.
Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.
It must also be weird for the sycophants who he just nominated to staff it too.
The equivalent of "Daddy got you a pink convertible and you get three minutes to drive it before the repo guy comes"
Oil burning was common in some regions. The Southern Pacific had a lot of oil-fired engines. Their famous "cab-forward" steam engines could only make sense as oil burners without fundamental redesign.
Part of it might be that the last holdouts for steam, who made the most technically advanced engines, were predominantly coal-carriers. They didn't have the oil infrastructure, and didn't want to burn relations eith their customers.
The livery and angular proprtions give it a nice fututistic look compard to the "half used soap bar" look of the most recent shinkansen designs
Don't tell him there's been women on the $1 coin since 1979, and recently themed seasonal quarter reverses that alternate between illegible and just overly busy.
Evidently 1980s game shows when exercising.
As another American who works in the industry, it's a wedding cake of frighteningly bad software piled on top of well-intentioned but poorly implemented mandates piled on top of willful ignorance frosted with solving problems people don't actually have. And the little couple on top are both the capitalist pigman from a 1930s Soviet poster that we all recognize thanks to Hexbear :`(
I prefer cash too.
But what data would it be?
Part of the "gobble all the data" perspective is that you need a broad corpus to be meaningfully useful. Not many people are going to give a $892 billion market cap when your model is a genius about a handful of narrow subjects that you could get deep volunteer support on.
OTOH maybe there's probably a sane business in narrow siloed (cheap and efficient and more bounded expectations) AI products: the reinvention of the "expert system" with clear guardrails, the image generator that only does seaside background landscapes but can't generate a cat to save its life, the LLM that's a prettified version of a knowledgebase search and NOTHING MORE
We've seen decentralized education and it tends to have problems with resourcing and economies of scale, and content policies get easily hijacked by loud people with personal vendettas.
That's what baffles me with the DOGE fracas. How long will solidarity hold when there are some very clear winners and losers within their own class?
There are a lot of billionaires who have fat revenue streams coming out of the federal budget, and I don't think they're all eager to trigger some sort of Mad Max/Medieval social collapse just so they can be the Archduke of San Jose after America implodes. I doubt they all bought the Network State story.
A fair number of them, expecting to live for more than 10 years and wanting to remain rich, probably invested aggressively into "skate where the puck is going" businesses that are now being slaughtered in the name of doubling down on fossil fuels and uncompetitive domestic manufacturers. Will Elon eat their losses? Of course, he's committing financial seppuku too.
In the end, insurers will be the harbingers of autonomous vehicles.
In 2050, the insurance will be twice as high if you insist on having a steering wheel, and it will have a major impact on buying decisions.
Operation Bernhard is a literal example. The Nazis tried to flood thr UK with counterfeit notes to undermine their economy.