Someone who I know frequents Mar A Lago, so yes this probably really happened told me he wanted to rename New Mexico to Best Mexico.

One of my buddies overheard this and set his joint down and said declaratively "yeah let's fuckin' do it". Good moment.

There's no reason to think it didn't.

I've been sold so hard on the general outlandishness at this I'd be disappointed if it didn't tbh

It's because Trump's tech donors used their bought access to barrage him with lesswrong-style lore dumps on the dangers of Artificial Superintelligence and the first and last thing he understood or cared about was that word.

This has indeed been my reading of Trump 2.0 in general. Silicon Valley is truly the greatest domestic enemy this country has ever had.

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 can't imagine why someone with control of a nuclear arsenal wasn't wetting his pants over the existential risk of graphic cards.

You don't have to convince me that he doesn't care about the economy and never did, but this was something that a great many of his followers talked themselves into believing two years ago.

My comment had nothing to do with the economy. I was finding humor at the visual of a guy with authority over an actual existential threat (nuclear arsenal) being told the lesswrong lore about graphic cards in data centers being far more dangerous to humanity, and presumably, thinking the less wrong guy has something wrong with him.

Whether AI winds up being just another industrial transition or the bogeyman of lore, those effects all happen through the economy. At first, anyway.

As I understood it the less wrong people think the A.I. will likely rapidly cause human extinction.

I'm not familiar with/ wasn't familiar with any "economic" phases of the less wrong lore.

The "fast takeoff" scenarios got most of the attention, but the "slow takeoff" scenarios better match the reality we find ourselves in and they tend to involve economics.

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.

Or New England

or the oceans, but maybe most of all the Kennedy center, he is a very bitter and spiteful person

Didn't he already force Google Maps to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America? ..

Yeah. But he has openly mused about renaming a river, a state and an ocean. Seriously apparently he wants to rename New Mexico.

Gulf of Mexico he also renamed in the US.

Such stuff only get renamed for the country with the government in question (WSA - Weird States of America?). To the rest of the world, the real name is still shown.

I half expected him to propose renaming the country into United America of America (UAA).

It's perfect for his followers. Doesn't require mental effort and can be correctly pronounced while giving head.

There is a kind of feral animal instinctual intelligence in some things Trump does. He is in fact an expert bully. He knows that when the tech industry people bend the knee a little bit, the correct follow up is to get them to lick his shoes.

This is absolutely true.

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.

He probably can rename New Mexico. Not formally, but he can tell government mapmakers to do it, and require it on government communications. Google would probably follow, after deciding that the national mapping authority overrides the local mapping authority.

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.