Ok, I’m going to make a new nutritional supplement: “oops! all electrons!”

On this specific point, I’d say that neither side seemed poised to pull that again. GOP has historically kicked off the biggest conflicts, but Trump’s rhetoric and even his first term seemed consistent with “it’s not worth risking American military over foreign crap” in a break from the broader GOP.

His second term seems to have shifted that and you can see it as it fractured his base, to the point where Trump supporters threw “America First” in his face and he petulantly declared HE gets to decide what “America First” means because he "invented’ it.

Conversely, you can’t have a house, you have no credit.

Fine I just paid off a 1.50 loan for a hot dog.

Ok, now you can borrow 500k because you proved yourself responsible with $1.50

Reality isn’t too far off, back in the day I couldn’t get a loan because I had zero credit history, but then could get a mortgage after a few months of getting a credit card with like a 500 dollar credit limit.

Who am I, Parker Lewis?

Ah yes, spend 30 minutes to download an image and print it out on your dot matrix printer to hide for use when you can’t access the computer.

Specifically, the magazines in the back of your older cousins closet they think they hid.

But you can get fancy, you visit your cousin overnight, who doesn’t have a spare bedroom so you just have to sleep on his couch in front of the TV that has just all of the channels on satellite… Especially those channels

Unfortunately the Pentium 60 botches your blockchain with some bad floating point operations.

Use up my turns in Tradewars 2002 on my local BBS and some other door games.

I’m not exactly sure what you think the specific ask is…

It’s very general, somehow he has the funds to have a maddeningly extravagant wedding, so he can afford to have a tax burden…

It’s vague and doesn’t invite debate over the nature and nuance of his wealth, only that he can somehow pull off a celebration no reasonable person could dream of, including closing off a whole crap ton of Venice to general public use for a whole week. That’s a whole lot of spend that he can casually brush off indicating that in real terms he’s got unreasonable levels of wealth.

It’s not getting down in the details about unrealized gains and leveraging said gains through loopholes and the discussion about what taxable burden might should be associated with unrealized gains of that magnitude, it’s showing a clear example of “he has extravagant financial power, without as high relatively of a financial burden”.

I wouldn’t think of it as somehow absolving people in the region from wanting to make this stuff happen, but without the resources and support from outside, they might be a bit more restrained by necessity/unable to inflict quite the scale of disasters.

Like how North Korea would have probably started some shit but they can’t because they don’t have anyone willing to boost their military capability to the requisite level. Meanwhile every player in the middle east has some bigger country happy to pump up their military resources while simultaneously tending to distance themselves from the result because a proxy war is safer than direct conflict.

Yes, as long as you were on the side that benefits from success, it was better to leave things “simple” and not challenge the incorrect stuff out loud you aren’t going to “well actually…” the “expert” if it risks your job and/or the wrong stuff isn’t too important or too hard to overcome when the rubber meets the road.

Still, sitting in a room or otherwise being a party to a conversation where an executive is constantly being confidently incorrect and still praised as a smart expert likely making 7 figures is maddening.

While I have not reviewed a lot of Musk speak, let alone armed with enough to credibly review his commentary, but based on my own field and “respected technical leaders” that interview with customers and the press, with broad acknowledgement that they really know their stuff…

Most of them I’ve known can sound very confident and credible while saying completely incorrect stuff. No one tries to correct them because them being actually correct doesn’t add value and trying to fix that is more trouble than it’s worth much of the time. The people paying attention don’t know well enough to recognize they are wrong… usually…

Upon occasion my company throws one of these “geniuses” at a customer that actually knows what they are doing. Then I got to see our executive basically try to gaslight the audience when they challenged his competency. The sales people has to last minute pull in the actual technical people to try to repair our image after the customer interacted with the executive…

Now one would think, clearly, after such an embarrassment, surely the company learned to field the actual technical experts to deal with technical questions… But no, for every smart customer that is turned off by that executive, there’s 10 more clients that don’t know any better and respond so much better to his baseless confidence than actual competent discussion. Also, those 10 suckers will also get suckered into more high margin stuff versus the smart customer, that will be really good at getting the most cost effective products, with low margin and skipping the pointless addions.