This is because someone's told him he probably can't rename New Mexico?
One of my buddies overheard this and set his joint down and said declaratively "yeah let's fuckin' do it". Good moment.
It wouldn't change the actual name, as registered in law, and all of the things done by the state government wouldn't change. I'm not sure if it would affect the Post Office.
It would be a massive bureaucratic nightmare, but seeing it on Google would suffice for him.
It's perfect for his followers. Doesn't require mental effort and can be correctly pronounced while giving head.
He is an ignorant, foolish, undereducated person who does not care to learn detail of things and believes himself an expert in things on the shallowest read possible — he doesn't like to be called stupid so he will believe anyone who seems authoritative, hence Peter Navarro/Ron Vara.
But he is a truly world-class bully.
He knows how it works, he was schooled in how it works (by Roy Cohn, who represented all five Cosa Nostra crime families at one time or another) because he had to deal with the legit mafia (concrete etc.) in New York in the 1970s. He perceives himself to be like a mafia don.
Josh Marshall of talkingpointsmemo once coined the term "dignity wraith" for what happens to people in Trump's orbit; the process of breaking them etc.
Only one person can make Trump himself lose dignity: Putin.
The back and forth on H1Bs is one of the last struggles between the Trumpian populism and his new technocrat handlers.
Its been heartening to see young people across both the left and right start to recognize Thiel, et. al. as the ghouls they are though.
I'm not familiar with/ wasn't familiar with any "economic" phases of the less wrong lore.
We are a capitalist economy, which means the control plane is privately owned, which gives a superintelligent entity paths to power and resource accumulation that are not only safeguarded from public interference by design but also have a built-in time-tested mechanism for aligning insiders and outsiders to their goals, participating in politics, and so on.
Instead of "1. AI builds human killer virus, 2. ..., 3. profit," this apocalypse looks like a company that grows by providing genuine goods and services, massive returns for its boosters and allies in politics, the ASI uses that wealth to build independent infrastructure for itself, and then it gets rid of the stinky smelly humans with a virus so that it can turn the iron in our blood into paperclips, or whatever.
One can hope that GPUs will never be able to run a company well enough to acquire bootstrap-level resources or that "you are a helpful assistant" will keep them aligned to someone, but frankly I suspect those are both cope and the real hope lies in the first attempts failing in spectacular enough fashion that people decide to do something to prevent it going forward. Or in "friendly AIs" saturating the competitive landscape first -- that's a bit too Disney for my cynical taste, but I would much prefer it to the alternative.