cyd

The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is a nothingburger, lol. The Asian countries that have joined the IPEF are just "giving face" to Biden and keeping the door open. The deals that are actually substantively shaping Asian trade are the CPTPP and RCEP, the latter of which includes China, and both of which exclude the US.

It would be funny if, after Biden watered down the IPEF into irrelevancy, it ended up becoming a way for Trump to attack him politically anyway.

Argentina's runaway inflation is caused by the central bank printing money (to finance the government's out of control spending). The rationale for dollarization is to remove the ability for the government to do this. It's not an inherently crazy idea, since (i) there are smaller Latin American countries that use the dollar, and (ii) the dollar is already used de facto for many purposes in Argentina because of how debased the peso has been. But there are lots of practical problems; notably, Argentina simply does not own enough dollars in the entire country to keep the economy running normally if they switch (whatever "normally" means for an economy like theirs).

The context is that LLMs need a big up front capital expenditure to get started, because of the processor time to train these giant neural networks. This is a huge barrier to the development of a fully open source LLM. Once such a foundation model is available, building on top of it is relatively cheaper; one can then envision an explosion of open source models targeting specific applications, which would be amazing.

So if the bulk of this €300M could go into training, it would go a long way to plugging the gap. But in reality, a lot of that sum is going to be dissipated into other expenses, so there's going to be a lot less than €300M for actual training.

Ideally, they'd just blow the entire $330M training an LLM, and release the weights. In reality, much of that money will probably go into paying salaries, various smaller research projects, etc.

This is not going to be a popular opinion on here, but when it comes to Asia, Biden's foreign policy is almost indistinguishable from Trump's.

Basically: aggressive ratcheting of trade and tech restrictions on China; gum up the international trading framework (e.g. WTO dispute resolution process); try to woo China's neighbors but steadfastly ignore their requests for better trade access with the US; discourage Chinese scientists and students from coming to the US. All of these initiatives originated under Trump, and are being continued under Biden, with minor tweaks.

What about the Illuminati, though?

Padme: These protections will extend to criticisms of Israel, right?

Anakin: ...

The plan proceeds apace: Benjamin Netanyahu rules out return of Palestinian Authority in Gaza

It's a genius level move for the Philippines to invite international reporters onto their ships as witnesses. Over the past few months they've gotten an incredible amount of good press, and the Chinese seem to be at a loss over how to respond, for now.

Honestly, China's handling of the Philippines must be among their worst foreign policy blunders in decades. They had a gold plated opportunity to build closer ties during the 2010s, when Duterte was president. Big-brain Xi pissed the opportunity away.

Fun fact about NK embassies, they are run like businesses, usually engaging in activities that are illegal or "illegal except for diplomatic immunity". They are expected to not only fund themselves, but also channel profits back home. If they can't do this, NK shuts them down.