General Trump Administration F**kery Thread (2025-2029)

[bnew]

Nvidia’s flattery of Trump wins reversal of AI chip limits and a Huawei clampdown

Kissing ass pays off.

www.theverge.com

Nvidia’s flattery of Trump wins reversal of AI chip limits and a Huawei clampdown​

Obstacles threatening Nvidia’s AI chip dominance are being tactically removed.
by Jess Weatherbed

May 14, 2025, 6:40 AM EDT
8 Comments8 New

Trump (lower left) and Jensen Huang (lower right) seen posing with the Saudi royal family and other US tech leaders at a Saudi-US business investment forum. Image: Win McNamee / Getty Images
Jess Weatherbed is a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.

Nvidia’s efforts to suck up to the Trump administration have seemingly paid off, with the US now lifting export limits on US-made AI chips and cracking down on anyone using Huawei’s emerging alternatives. The announcements come as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined President Trump in Saudi Arabia this week to solicit AI investments for US companies.

The US Department of Commerce (DOC) announced on Monday that it has rescinded the Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Rule, due to take effect on May 15th, that aimed to restrict how many US-made AI chips could be sent to international markets without special government approval. The DOC said that a replacement rule for protecting US AI technology will be issued “in the future,” but provided no specific details.
“These new requirements would have stifled American innovation and saddled companies with burdensome new regulatory requirements,” The DOC said in a statement. “The AI Diffusion Rule also would have undermined US diplomatic relations with dozens of countries by downgrading them to second-tier status.”

Trump’s favorite government meddler Elon Musk was also rubbing shoulders with Huang and the Saudi prince at the investment forum. Image: Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images

While the goal was to prevent countries already subject to chip restrictions, such as Russia and China, from accessing or building AI tech, it also placed Nvidia’s estimated 90 percent share of the AI chip market in jeopardy. Shortly after the Diffusion Rule was introduced by former President Joe Biden in January, Nvidia issued a statement calling it “misguided,” while anticipating a return to Trump’s first term policies “that strengthen American leadership, bolster our economy and preserve our competitive edge in AI and beyond.”

The DOC also warned companies that using Huawei’s Ascend AI chipset “anywhere in the world” would violate US export control agreements. Huawei’s home-grown Ascend processors are seen as China’s best answer to Nvidia’s powerful AI chips.

Nvidia’s Huang was notably one of the only US tech leaders to not attend Donald Trump’s inauguration. His absence doesn’t appear to have soured the relationship between them, however, with Huang spotted cosying up to Trump at a US-Saudi investment summit in Riyadh on Tuesday, alongside other tech leaders like Elon Musk, AMD’s Lisa Su, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.
The Washington Post reports that Trump was far from subtle about what the US wanted from the gathering. “As you know, we have the biggest business leaders in the world here,” he told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “They’re going to walk away with a lot of checks for a lot of things that you’re going to provide.”

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

Qatar Airways signs deal for 160 Boeing jets during Trump visit — Reuters

State carrier Qatar Airways signed a deal on Wednesday to purchase jets from U.S. manufacturer Boeing during President Donald Trump's visit to the Gulf Arab country.

apple.news

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

Ohio man accused of burning 100 books on Black, Jewish, LGBTQ history — NBC News

The Beachwood Police Department said the man checked out the books in April, days after he went to the library branch and got a library card.

apple.news

do you guys support this?

 

[bnew]

How Donald Trump blew the offshore wind industry off course

Projects aren’t dead in the water, but they’re sitting ducks.

www.theverge.com

• Science
• Environment
• Climate

How Donald Trump blew the offshore wind industry off course​

New wind farms are still being built, but they’ll have to weather the storm of the Trump administration.
by Justine Calma

May 14, 2025, 10:10 AM EDT

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images
Justine Calma is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.
2 Comments2 New

Rewind a few years, and it looked as if offshore wind might take off in the US. The Biden administration moved to open up much of the nation’s coastlines to development, blue and even a couple swing states agreed to work with the White House to speed things up, and Congress passed sweeping tax incentives for renewable energy. Now, the tide has turned, and President Donald Trump is waging a war on windmills, attempting to kill projects that are already underway.

Trump’s actions are putting tens of billions of dollars of investment at risk as developers try to forge ahead with the first batch of commercial-scale projects to break ground in the US. Even if they survive, the cloud of economic uncertainty around wind power could cast a shadow over the industry for years beyond the end of Trump’s term.
“The outlook is far dimmer than it was a year ago,” says Oliver Metcalfe, head of wind research at BloombergNEF (BNEF). “It’s been non-stop bad news for the US offshore wind sector since Trump took office.”
“It’s been non-stop bad news for the US offshore wind sector since Trump took office.”

On earnings calls over the past couple weeks, companies building offshore wind farms in the US have been hammered with iterations of the same question: is your project going to make it?

Right now, a handful of wind farms are under construction off the East Coast. They’re worth $30 billion in investments and are expected to generate a combined 5.7GW of carbon pollution-free energy by the time they come online over the next four years or so.

Other US-based projects that haven’t started construction yet are at risk of being canceled or facing significant delays, according to BNEF’s latest forecast. Energy research firm Wood Mackenzie similarly only expects projects that have already secured financing and have started building to make headway with offshore construction over the next five to 10 years.

The industry as a whole has suffered from a negative feedback loop, says Stephen Maldonado, a research analyst at Wood Mackenzie. Projects canceled due to increasing costs scare off investors for new wind farms and factories that make turbines — keeping costs high and making new projects even more financially unfeasible. “The political situation going on here right now is just making that worse,” Maldonado says.

As soon as he was inaugurated, Trump signed a presidential memorandum that halted federal leasing and permitting for any new wind projects, either on land or at sea. The directive “has stopped most wind-energy development in its tracks,” says a complaint filed last week by 17 states and the District of Columbia, which are suing to stop the order. The Trump administration has posed an “existential threat to the wind industry,” plaintiffs contend.

The White House is calling the lawsuit a partisan attack. “Instead of working with President Trump to unleash American energy and lower prices for American families, Democrat Attorneys General are using lawfare to stop the President’s popular energy agenda,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email to The Verge.

Trump is weirdly obsessed with turbines. He spouts misinformation about windmills driving whales “freaking crazy” and leading to them washing up ashore without any evidence. The leading causes of death for whales are vessel strikes and entanglement with fishing gear, and conservationists have advocated for offshore wind as a way to eliminate the fossil fuel pollution causing the climate crisis and devastating ocean ecosystems. Trump boasted in January that “no new windmills” would be built on his watch, saying they “litter” the US like “garbage in a field.”

Whether the president is tilting at an imaginary foe or not, the industry is already feeling the pain. In late April, BNEF’s estimate for offshore wind additions over the next decade fell by 56 percent compared to before Trump’s election. After that dramatic shift, it now expects only about 17GW of offshore wind capacity by 2035. That’s a far cry from former President Joe Biden’s goal of 30GW of energy from offshore wind by 2030.

Related​

• Whales are dying, but it’s not because of wind farms

The US has far more potential with its vast shorelines. Offshore wind could provide up to a quarter of the nation’s electricity by 2050, according to one analysis. So far, only a few, small wind farms have been completed in the US. The country’s first commercial-scale operation powered up last year, but it isn’t expected to become fully operational until this year. If it does, it’s supposed to provide enough electricity for 400,000 homes in Massachusetts.

Projects that are further along aren’t necessarily immune to the whims of the Trump administration. The president sent shockwaves through the industry when he ordered a major wind project off the coast of New York to halt construction in mid-April, even though the project had federal and state approvals in place. Construction already employed 1,500 people, according to Equinor, the Norwegian energy company building it. The Empire Wind project was 30 percent complete and had put in $1.2 billion in investments in US supply chains, Equinor says. The company is considering taking legal action, as noted in an April 31st earnings call.
“The government in the US, they have not shared with us the reason for the stop work authority. So, it is a situation where, you know, we don’t understand why,” Equinor CEO Anders Opedal said during the call. “We have always assumed that the United States of America will honor contracts and permits they have issued … so this is an unlawful action by them, and we are going to treat it like that.”

 

[bnew]

By Monday, Equinor was reportedly considering canceling Empire Wind altogether. The company has been spending $50 million a week just to maintain the project during the construction pause, according to Reuters and Bloomberg.

Two other energy companies, Dominion Energy and Ørsted, had to answer questions during earnings calls about what makes their projects in the US any less vulnerable than Equinor’s. Leadership of both companies were adamant about pushing their projects through to completion. They’re further along in construction than Equinor, which could insulate them, but that also means the companies would have more to lose.

Dominion is building the largest offshore wind farm by far, with more than double the capacity of others in construction. Its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is 55 percent complete, and construction is reportedly on schedule to wrap up next year. It’s supposed to be able to generate enough electricity for up to 660,000 homes once fully operational. It’s also situated near Virginia’s data center alley — where AI is pushing electricity demand ever higher.

When asked what the company would do if the Trump administration sent it a stop work order, CEO Bob Blue told analysts that he doesn’t expect such a pause because the project is “the fastest way to get 2.6 gigawatts on the grid to serve tech companies, defense and security installations, important American industries.”

Danish company Ørsted, the world’s leading offshore wind developer, is roughly 75 percent complete with the Revolution Wind farm expected to start operating next year off the coast of Rhode Island. It’s building an even larger wind farm called Sunrise Wind off the coast of New York that’s about 35 percent complete and due to come online in 2027.
Ørsted has been facing global headaches for years since the COVID-19 pandemic messed up supply chains and increased inflation. After canceling two New Jersey projects in 2023, the company canceled a major UK project last week, citing rising supply chain costs and interest rates.

Related​

• States sue Trump over ‘existential threat’ to wind energy
• Donald Trump’s crusade against offshore wind just got more serious

Trump’s tariff regime is not helping. He slapped a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum imports — materials used to make turbines. Those tariffs have led to rising costs for Ørsted’s US developments, adding up to a 1.2 billion impairment in Danish crowns (roughly $180 million), the company said in an earnings call. The industry has also been hit by a 20 percent tariff (only 10 percent has been implemented so far) on imports from the European Union, where the US gets most offshore wind components. Ørsted expects the tariffs on EU products to have “less than half of the impact” of steel and aluminum tariffs.

Yet another threat looms over the industry: whether Congress will act to reverse tax credits for wind projects set under the Biden administration. “It would be a killer blow,” BNEF’s Metcalfe says.

Offshore projects are more expensive and complex to build than onshore wind, which is a more mature industry in the US that already provides 10 percent of the nation’s electricity. Turbines at sea, however, are able to take advantage of higher and more consistent wind speeds that can hopefully generate electricity reliably and efficiently for population centers along coastlines. But at the moment, the nascent industry is relying on federal subsidies to gain a foothold in the US.

Those tax credits are in jeopardy as House Republicans propose phasing down key tax incentives included in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The president has railed against what he calls Biden’s “green new scam,” even though red and swing states — where there’s been significant investment in new clean energy projects — benefit the most from tax credits for wind and solar energy from the IRA.

Trump isn’t alone in opposing offshore wind, of course. Fossil fuel interests, the commercial fishing industry, and some local residents concerned about turbines marring their ocean views have also opposed new offshore wind projects. A manufacturing flaw that led to a turbine failure off the coast of Massachusetts in July 2024 sent a blade plummeting into the Atlantic and left shards of fiberglass on beaches. Not only did that lead to construction delays, it also elicited a wave of headlines that stoked fears about the potential environmental impact of new wind farms.
Turbine failures are rare, luckily. And other parts of the world have managed to make more headway than the US, although recent tariff threats have created turbulence. Offshore turbines provided about 4 percent of Europe’s electricity last year. China is the leading market for offshore wind, home to more than half of global offshore capacity added last year.

Seeing successful projects can alleviate some initial fears about offshore wind and have already shifted the tone of conversations elsewhere, Metcalfe says. But they’d need a chance to get off the ground first.

 

[Blackfyre]

Roberts: Tall people in the Middle East, I've noticed. The prime minister is quite tall. Donald Trump is 6'2", 6'3".

 

[BiggWebb79]

 

[DeuceZ]

Trump describing the Syrian president like a shawty... young and attractive

 

[bnew]

US transportation secretary changed wife’s flight from Newark after ongoing issues at airport

Airport has seen multiple serious failures in past weeks while Sean Duffy has assured the public it’s safe to fly from there

www.theguardian.com

US transportation secretary changed wife’s flight from Newark after ongoing issues at airport​

Airport has seen multiple serious failures in past weeks while Sean Duffy has assured the public it’s safe to fly from there
Ed Pilkington in New York

Wed 14 May 2025 11.57 EDT

Sean Duffy, the Trump administration’s transportation secretary, has revealed that he switched flights for his wife this week to help her avoid flying out of beleaguered Newark Liberty, one of the busiest airports in the New York area.

Duffy’s disclosure on Monday followed his repeated assurances to the American public that it is safe to fly from Newark, despite a spate of dramatic outages affecting the airport’s radar systems that is causing ongoing disruption and delays. On Sunday, the transportation secretary went on NBC News’s Meet the Press and insisted Newark was safe.
“It is,” he protested. “I fly out of Newark all the time, my family flies out of Newark.”



US transportation secretary plans to reduce flights at Newark airport

Read more

Hours later, speaking to the conservative radio host David Webb on SiriusXM, he said: “My wife was flying out of Newark tomorrow, I switched her flight to LaGuardia”.

A spokesperson for the US Department of Transportation said that the flight was changed for scheduling purposes not for safety reasons. They added: “It’s safe to fly out of Newark. We are fixing the problems.”

Newark Liberty is one of the biggest airports in the New York area and the 12th busiest in the US. In 2023, it served more than 49 million passengers, its heaviest load on record.

For several months the airport has been troubled by technical glitches, combined with a shortage of air traffic controllers and runway construction. In the past two weeks it has suffered three radar outages because of computer problems, traumatizing its staff and causing disruption to flights.

The most serious communications blackout last Friday lasted for 90 seconds, during which time contact was broken between the control tower and planes.

Staff shortages have also become severe. On Monday the airport’s scheduled roster of 14 air traffic controllers was depleted to just three, leading to delays in flights of up to seven hours.

The ongoing travails at Newark have presented Duffy and the Trump administration with a messaging problem. The transportation secretary has tried to offload blame on the previous presidency of Joe Biden, but at the same time he has attempted to reassure passengers and radiate confidence in the future.

His criticisms of the Biden administration prompted a rebuke from his predecessor, Pete Buttigieg. The former transportation secretary said that Duffy “needs to spend more time doing what the American people are paying him to do – fix problems – and less time blaming others”.

Duffy’s challenge has been compounded by the actions of Elon Musk and his government-slashing crew, Doge, which has imposed cuts in staff at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency responsible for air safety. Duffy insisted to Meet the Press that none of the staff cuts had involved safety positions such as air traffic controllers, but he did admit that some of those let go had since returned to their posts.
“Elon and I get on really well … He understands the importance of the air space and the need to have good controllers,” Duffy said.

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

Zelenskyy asks for Pope Leo XIV's help in bringing Ukrainian children home from Russia — NPR

Pope Leo XIV and Ukraine's President Zelenskyy spoke by phone recently, according to the Vatican.

apple.news

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

Trump describing the Syrian president like a shawty... young and attractive

It’s just how he likes to see people. Nothing sus about it

 

[jmegamar]

Yea no shyt they shouldn’t take medical advice from you. Yet you can tell people with decades of medical experience that they are wrong

 

[bnew]

Health and Human Services Honcho RFK Jr. Tells Congress He Doesn’t Think Anyone Should Take ‘Medical Advice from Me’

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that the doesn't "think people should be taking medical advice from me" during a hearing on Wednesday.

www.mediaite.com

Health and Human Services Honcho RFK Jr. Tells Congress He Doesn’t Think Anyone Should Take ‘Medical Advice from Me’​

Isaac SchorrMay 14th, 2025, 12:20 pm

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that the doesn’t “think people should be taking medical advice from me” during a hearing before the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday.

Kennedy’s statement came after Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) noted that Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine advocate, has vaccinated his own children, before asking, “If you had a child today, would you vaccinate that child for measles?”

“For measles?” asked Kennedy, mulling the question over. “Probably for measles I-, you know, what I would say is my opinions about vaccines are irrelevant,” before suggesting he thought “everybody can make that decision” for themselves.

“I don’t want to make it seem like I’m being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking advice, medical advice from me,” he continued.

“Right, no, I got that, and I’m not asking you to give them medical advice,” replied Pocan. “But would you vaccinate your children?”

“I think if I answer that question directly, it will seem like I’m giving advice to other people, and I don’t want to be doing that,” insisted Kennedy. “I want people to make up their own-”

“But that’s kind of your jurisdiction, cause CDC does give advice, right?” followed up Pocan. “I’m not trying to do it as a gotcha.”

“I think what we’re gonna try to do is lay out the pros and cons, the risks and benefits accurately, as we understand them,” responded Kennedy.

"My opinions about vaccines are irrelevant…I don't think people should be taking medical advice from me" — RFK Jr., America's top health official. pic.twitter.com/qnId4UvvXK

— 314action (@314action) May 14, 2025

Measles cases have risen during the first few months of Kennedy’s tenure in his position. Just a few weeks into that tenure, The Wall Street Journal editorialized that he was “already vindicating his critics.”

“First, he downplayed a measles outbreak in Texas. Then he reportedly hired a trial-lawyer ally to work on a government study of the link between vaccines and autism. Now he has pushed out a top Food and Drug Administration official because he helped accelerate approval of the Covid vaccines,” observed the Journal at the time.

Watch the clip above.

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

Venezuela's Maduro thanks Trump for return of toddler left behind in US — Reuters

A Venezuelan toddler separated from her parents after they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border together a year ago and who remained in the U.S. when they were deported arrived in Venezuela on Wednesday, where President Nicolas Maduro thanked U.S. President Donald Trump for her return.

apple.news

What a legacy

 

[Tony D'Amato]