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Donald Trump attempts time-travel

Today, a follow-up on a few recent columns.

Firstly, the Bambu Lab saga has become even more interesting, as it is revealed that the company silently changed one of its web-pages to remove a somewhat incriminating statement it had earlier made about the future of its printers.

Initially, the company claimed that if users failed to update their printers to the new firmware, and thus give away their privacy, that printer may no longer be able to print. Now the page makes no reference to that claim and the changes were apparently made "silently" so the company could then claim that such rumours were "misinformation".

Tsk, tsk... bad form Bambu Lab!

Naturally, the response from the community has been even more outrage and an understanding that any company that seeks to lie in this way does not deserve their trust nor their money. Thank goodness for those few websites that regularly archive pages from the Net for posterity -- so we can catch out this sort of behaviour.

TikTok has come back online for millions of Americans, after new President Donald Trump threw them a 75-day lifeline. They now have to find a new owner or co-owner to avoid the ban coming back into effect in just over a couple of months' time.

Some interesting claims are being made in the USA in respect to the form its new government is taking.

The word of the day is "oligarchy" and, to be honest, I can see why this appears to be the case.

At Trump's inauguration there was a star-studded lineup of the richest and most powerful people in the tech sector. All the big names were there including Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos. These titans of the tech sector certainly appear to have a lot of influence and lobbying power in the Oval Office now.

The question that should be asked is: "Is this a good or a bad thing?"

I strongly suspect that none of the super-rich tech-barons amassed their huge wealth by looking out for other people but then again there appears to be a point in some people's lives where they realise that they have so much money and power that the only thing that is novel and interesting to them is philanthropy. Can we but hope that those billionaires are all going to be working in concert to "Make America Great Again"?

Trump's vision seems to be to return the USA to its heydays back in the 1950s and 1960s. This was an era when there was propsperity, full employment, the nation was a world-leader in many different industries and it was the envy of so many other nations across the globe.

However, if we recall correctly, this was also an era of paranoia (reds under the bed), a deeply worrying cold war, the threat of global thermonuclear war and a lot of other bad things.

Come to think of it -- I can see the growing similarities, at least in some respects, between the USA in the 50s/60s and exactly where the USA is headed today.

With the introduction of stiff tariffs, the USA may become a highly insular and isolated economy. That will certainly create massive levels of employment but it will also likely cause a significant reduction in the standards of living for many. When tee-shirts cost $20 instead of $10 and TV sets cost $1,000 instead of $300 the public may be less inclined to embrace Trump's vision.

It certainly seems as if the USA in 2027 could become a close analog of the USA in 1955 though.

The domestic auto industry will boom as US-made cars become the only affordable option, thanks to a 100 percent tariff on imports. Consumer appliances such as fridges, washing machines and the like will also return to "made in America" status, with a resulting hike in prices but a huge demand for labour.

The downside is that we also live in a new age of AI-industrialisation. I think that many of the jobs that this insular economy should produce will instead be relegated to automation.

Instead of workers manning assembly lines to create cars, whiteware, clothing, etc., we could see automation doing those jobs. Wait, it gets worse...

I've been watching a lot of videos recently from "creatives" in the form of writers, artists, videographers, film-makers, PR companies etc., and they all claim that AI is about to take their jobs.

So it won't just be manual labour that is relegated to the history books, but also those tasks that were, until very recently, only possible for a real person to perform.

With this in mind, it would appear that the gap between rich and poor will grow significantly in the USA over the next four years and those tech oligarchs will become even more wealthy and powerful -- while increasing numbers of regular folk are heavily taxed (through those tariffs on many things they buy) and left on the unemployment scrapheap.

Ultimately however, such a system is self-correcting.

It's no use manufacturing mountains of stuff if only a very few can afford to buy them. This means that exporting must be a focus and you simply can't export to countries when you are effectively saying to them "we don't want YOUR exports".

As with everything, it appears that we're simply repeating a cycle driven by a multitude of factors. Nature eventually finds a way to achieve equilibrium, even if it is only through oscilating cycles that, over time, average out to a nice comfortable medium.

So grab your popcorn, find a comfy chair, sit back and enjoy the threatre that will be the second Trump administration in the USA. Whether the outcomes are "great" or awful, there can be no doubt that it will be entertaining.

Carpe Diem folks!

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