Is it too late to stop corruption in the Trump Administration?

 https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/17/trump-tariffs-warren-bessent-lutnick-democrats.html

 

The Trump administration’s tumultuous rollout of a spate of new tariffs is “rife with opportunities to unduly influence President Trump and other administration officials,” the Democrats wrote in a letter shared first with CNBC on Thursday.

The letter, signed by 47 House and Senate members, asks Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to detail the administration’s “plans to prevent the misuse of tariffs for self-dealing.”

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Tariffs are very flexible things, as Trump has shown by constantly changing dates, percentages, and what is covered.  If someone who has Trump's ear can convince him to drop a certain product, say, lumber, from a country's tariff, the person that did the convincing might be rewarded handsomely by, say, a big lumber company.  

This of course is only one small area of the Trump administration that seems designed for insider wealth-building.  If one knew, as another example, just when Trump was going to rescind his plan for imposing tariffs, one could likely making a killing on the stock market by timing one's investments.

If someone wanted to slip Trump some money without having to account for the money, one could purchase a load of Trump cyber coins, letting Trump know off-hand that oh, I happened to think investing $30 million in your cyber coins is a good idea.  As an investment, of course, Not a bribe or anything.

If someone wanted to get a federal department off their company's back, they might make a suggestion to DOGE to shut down that federal department.

On and on it goes.  The entire structure of Trump's administration is one designed, I believer, to make corruption easy and excusable.  And to think we voted for this.

 

 

 

The fallacy of unlimited electricity

 The world has reacted to global warming by changing how we make electricity. Coal plants are being shut down (with no thanks to Trump), in favor of wind power and photovoltaic cells. Now these are even becoming more economically viable in addition to their less harmful effects on the environment. So we can feel good about all that.

But now here comes several new users of electricity that each have rapacious appetites. Bitcoins are created by computers solving difficult mathematical equations. This industry alone has grown to use more electricity than the nation of Poland. We also have online platforms like Youtube and Amazon that take up terrawatt hours of electricity. Now the newest super-consumer is artificial intelligence, which is a huge user. The projection is that “electricity demand from data centres worldwide is set to more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh), slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today. AI will be the most significant driver of this increase, with electricity demand from AI-optimised data centres projected to more than quadruple by 2030 “ [https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electricity-demand-from-data-centres-while-offering-the-potential-to-transform-how-the-energy-sector-works].

So on the one hand, we are making greener electricity, but on the other hand, the demand is growing so fast that we may not be able to keep up. This will increase pressure to re-open mothballed coal and gas plants. And there goes all the effort to help prevent global warming. There needs to be discussion about what is more important, our freedom to make AI cat videos, or a livable planet?