Ad hominem aside, TheSanSabaSongbird's basic point, that price controls are an economically illiterate idea, is right. Prices are an economy's way of signalling scarcity, so messing with that signal prevents the underlying problem from being solved. Inflation has to be tackled through monetary and fiscal policy; the alternative approach, micromanaging prices, is how you get to the economy of Argentina.
Picking out one price rise, and calling it out because it's higher than the average inflation rate, is silly. Since inflation is the rise in the price level, averaged over all goods, almost by definition there will be some prices rising by more than average (and others less than average).
In fact, it's well known that inflation hits very unevenly across different prices in an economy. The 1970s inflationary episode, for example, started with gas prices going up due to the oil embargo, before bleeding through into other prices. There are entire fields of economics dedicated to looking at inflation through different segments of the economy, precisely because price rises can be so uneven.
The bigger issue is that inflation is a problem of monetary and fiscal policy, which means pointing to greed is totally beside the point. Inflation was quiescent during the 2010s, and it's not like people and companies were magically non-greedy during that period.
Inflation literally means prices going up. Calling it as greed isn't useful, because greed can lead to both price increases or decreases, depending on the context. For example, firms that are greedy for market share can drive prices down (a phenomenon that American consumers have benefited from greatly, over decades).
The US government has given itself far reaching powers over such matters. International investments of strategic importance must go through a government committee (CFIUS), which decides for itself what "strategic importance" means. The government can also compel individuals, e.g. it has banned US citizens outside the US from working for Chinese semiconductor firms. A lot of this is done at the executive level, with no legislative oversight and no avenue for recourse by affected parties.
The idea of the US government staying in its lane, away from private sector affairs, is pretty much dead and buried at this point.
“China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the United States can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion and recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot.”
-- Lee Kuan Yew
If anything, the repressed and defensive China of Xi Jinping is falling ever further behind.
I didn't know it was already settled law. But in that case, why are models like llama still released under licenses? If they are non-copyrightable, licenses should be unenforceable and therefore irrelevant.
Fun fact: Chevron deference emerged from the Reagan era conservative movement, and was originally used to justify giving federal agencies leeway to waive regulations as part of the Reaganite push for freer markets.
Neil Gorsuch's mom ran the EPA during this time and was part of this Chevron deference-enablef deregulatory push.
Steel is a complex manufactured intermediate good, not just a raw material that you dig out of the ground. Steel products and production methods evolved rapidly over the course of the 20th century, and the downfall of British steel was because they couldn't/wouldn't upgrade their tech and how their industry was organized.
Problem is, there isn't a way to open up the black boxes. It's the AI explainability problem. Even if you have the model weights, you can't predict what they will do without running the model, and you can't definitively verify that the model was trained as the model maker claimed.
Liability. Imagine an AI girlfriend who slowly earns your affection, then at some point manipulates you into sending bitcoins to a prespecified wallet set up by the model maker. Because models are black boxes, there is no way to verify by direct inspection that an AI hasn't been trained with an ulterior agenda (the "execute order 66" problem).
Ten thousand Palestinian children have been killed in the past 100 days, according to Save the Children. Yet Biden’s statement last Sunday calling on Hamas to release its 100 or so hostages made next to no reference to Palestinian suffering. It is as though acknowledgment of their plight would cast doubt on his heartfelt sympathy for the Israeli victims of Hamas’s barbaric rampage on October 7. Many younger Americans, whose enthusiasm Biden will badly need in November, are alienated. That is not to mention Arab-Americans, who are a key voting bloc in several swing states.
It also plays into Biden's "old and out of touch" image problem:
From his earliest days in politics he was one of Israel’s staunchest allies on Capitol Hill. But the circumstances in which his affection was forged have changed drastically. Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, two Israeli leaders he admired, stood for the antithesis of Netanyahu’s brand of politics... At a fundraiser last month, Biden said: “We’re not going to do a damn thing other than to protect Israel. Not a single thing.”
Ad hominem aside, TheSanSabaSongbird's basic point, that price controls are an economically illiterate idea, is right. Prices are an economy's way of signalling scarcity, so messing with that signal prevents the underlying problem from being solved. Inflation has to be tackled through monetary and fiscal policy; the alternative approach, micromanaging prices, is how you get to the economy of Argentina.