Donald Trump, through Trump Media & Technology Group, the company through which his family controls Truth Social, has launched a service that allows users to receive his messages milliseconds earlier than other users. The price is $100,000 per month. Why would anyone pay that amount? Because high-frequency funds, which use algorithms to execute stock market trades in fractions of a second, can exploit any time advantage when a Trump message is capable of shaking the markets.
The idea is morally perverse for two reasons. The first is that Trump turns public office into an asset from which to extract private profit. The second is that he now has an additional incentive to keep firing off one outrageous statement after another: the product's value depends on his messages continuing to move the markets. High-frequency traders will pay because, as soon as one of their rivals has that advantage, the rest will have no choice but to match it. Although more than one of them would probably gladly shell out those $100,000 for the opposite service: not having to listen to him.
The disruption of Russian energy supplies forces a look southward
International politics is always a balancing act between the ideal and the necessary. Hence, now that Europe is turning off the tap on Russian energy, countries across the continent find themselves compelled to strengthen their fuel supplies from countries such as Qatar or, in Spain's case, Algeria, with which relations had deteriorated in recent years due, above all, to the Western Sahara conflict. Spain's major energy companies and the government have traveled to the North African country to strengthen ties with a major gas producer, first in a more political phase and in the future in a more commercial one.
Burnham sets social control against cost-of-living relief
Andy Burnham, Britain's new Prime Minister, wants to change policy priorities. In particular, he is promising to fund the elimination of VAT on electricity with savings made by canceling the introduction of a mandatory electronic identity card, something that is particularly unpopular in the United Kingdom, where no identity document exists. Darren Jones, from Keir Starmer's team, says the numbers do not add up. The country's budget, like those of the rest of the West, is under severe strain, and tax cuts require creative accounting in any case. But it is noteworthy that Burnham sets social control measures — in this case focused on immigration — against those that aim, plain and simply, to reduce the cost of living.
Quote of the day
Daniel Ortega's declaration that, under his family's dictatorship, Nicaragua will never again hold elections lays bare his true authoritarian nature. They have abandoned even the appearance of popular approval — Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State
AIs act as encyclopedists compiling all human knowledge
As often happens with technology, artificial intelligence has two faces: on one hand it is a way of privatizing knowledge, insofar as a relatively demanding use of several of the models requires payment, but on the other it is helping to reorganize and channel the immense human knowledge accumulated over millennia. For example, little-known and highly specialized books are attracting the interest of tech companies to scan them... and physically destroy them in the process, as if it were a digestive process. Content creators rightly claim to be compensated for the value of their work, but there is also value in the almost encyclopedic work of artificial intelligences.
