America has 2 major exports --- stability and debt. And these are interconnected. When stability declines, financing debt becomes more expensive.
The current administration is struggling to figure this out.
You can't maintain that if the primary "consumers" of those exports are not actual allies.
Yes, all the more reason why attacking our allies is pure insanity.
A lot of the countries we just attacked in the "trade war" are the same ones who buy our Treasury bonds.
"Tariff Man" failed to make this obvious connection until after it was demonstrated to him. T-Bill yields jumped half a percent in a week after he made a complete fool of himself with "Liberation Day" in the WH rose garden. With one act of utter stupidity, "Tariff Man" cost the country more than DOGE has saved.
In other words, unforced economic suicide is certainly an option to end the status quo --- but not a very good/desirable one.
Because blanket generalizations suck, I'll point out that 48.34% of voters did recognize a con artist.
So really, the vast majority of Americans, in practicality, voted for trump.
Thanks for the constructive feedback.
I genuinely hope you enjoy the rest of your day. :)
The honest truth is that americans voted against democrats, not for republicans. Your mentality shows how ignorant people are willfully being. Many people sat out the election because all candidates were garbage, and democrats made it worse.
Democrats put up a BLACK WOMAN as their candidate and then acted surprised that a majority of americans said "no thanks". Then democrats like to act like "Oh we would have won if more people just voted", which ignores the reality of what happened.
For what it's worth, I don't disagree with some of what you're saying. I just don't feel like it's productive to engage with someone who starts off a conversation by telling someone to "Knock it off" and then proceeds to call their perspective dumb. I'm happy to chat, but your attitude and tone suggest that your heels are firmly dug in and you aren't actually interested in a constructive dialogue. I could be wrong, but your doubling down by attacking my politeness suggests that maybe I'm not. At any rate, I'll pass.
Like I said, enjoy your night!
Honestly this next four years is going to be great everywhere else now that we're becoming desensitized to the news again.
I've never seen such a unifying figure in my life -- and the opportunity for Canada in the next decade is huge.
Decoupling is a surgical procedure we've been putting off for too long.
I liked that turkish saying that goes like "When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a sultan. The palace becomes a circus."
> "Odd," said Arthur. "I thought you said it was a democracy."
> "I did," said Ford. "It is."
> "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
> "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
> "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
> "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
> "But," said Arthur, going in for the big one again, "why?"
> "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in.”
Negative partisanship is a hell of a drug.
Hence why we need to work for direct democracy. Unfortunately it is nearly impossible to get there because it is not in the interest of your representatives, or so they believe.
Not shocking, we’re all bundled into a clown car, you get that lurching “here we go” feeling.
That's the real change.
The drop of America is consistent with it's president behaviour towards its allies, but it's still surprising that it's so intense that now China seems better for the world than it was a few months ago, even though nothing really changed.
Rocking the world's financial markets and disappearing people is nothing? I honestly don't know how to process such an opinion...
Worth a couple of points at least.
Possibly a better poll would be to arrange the countries in order of trustworthiness etc.
I have seen estimates that dissolving USAID has caused 10,000 excess deaths, so far.
They threatened three countries with military invasion.
They placed real punitive tariffs on most of the world besides Russia.
They began abducting legal foreign residents and sending some to a foreign prison camp, and not complying with legal orders to return them.
They are responsible for a surge of detained foreign visitors at the border in prison like conditions, sometimes with limited access to their embassies.
They disavowed NATO, saying Europe would have to be responsible for its own security.
I could go on, but China is in fact a more reliable and a more responsible world actor than the US now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Friendship,_Cooperat...
China being all about business is very reasonable, both sides will try to do best for themselves. Which is power dynamic that you can trust to continue.
Maybe if you run an international business? So like, 0.01% of citizens?
I actually kind of like that the US is no longer being put on a pedestal. Let someone else have a turn. See how they do, maybe good things will happen.
I suspect that more than %0.01 of the Americans will be impacted.
Is it a bad thing if those giant tech companies come back down to earth? I would argue no. They do not provide value, they extract it, generally, and play shitty games with taxes.
What good does Meta provide to humanity? Why do I pay netflix to watch ads? Why does google ignore their own search api directives when I put a word in quotes? (To show ads) The only possible actual value amazon created is AWS, the rest is peddling garbage products from garbage vendors. Apple lost the plot somehow with their sw/hw stack, they could use a wakeup. And tesla, ironically, seems poised to be the first domino to tip, the cybertruck is a disaster.
If those companies have such a significant impact on global citizens, they probably should blow up, that isn't a "good thing" at all, that much influence.
"100 supply, 101 demand: price goes up. 100 supply, 99 demand: price goes down."
Pretty sure that the US reputation dropped during Trump's first term, but this time he surely has broken his personal record. Also I think this time it's not only Trump: his oligarchs probably had an influence on that (starting with Musk and his Nazi salutes).
Of course, the threats to invade Canada and EU territories (amongst others) had an impact, too. As for the tariffs, I really feel like it's helping China's reputation: they stay strong against the bully who seems to be about to lose that battle.
But with Milei in Argentina, Noboa in Ecuador, Bolsonaro in Brasil and the upheaval in Chile and Colombia, there's plenty of far-right stupidity to go around and keep supporting Trump even if he's not playing nice.
And there's also the elephant in the room that's Venezuela. You see it with Venezuelans all the time. Even though they're being targeted by the Trump administration, they all still love him as if he were some sort of messiah just because he's opposed to Maduro.
Some of it is Musk fanboys and Trump shills and Russian political operatives and such. I'm sure some of that is going on.
But some of it is just regular HN users who are sick and tired of political stories. There have been a huge increase in political stories in the past three months. And even if some of the stories are interesting, to some people, the second story in 12 hours isn't interesting, and the third similar story this week also isn't interesting.
Some people are here instead of Reddit for a reason. They don't want HN to turn into Reddit. So they tend to flag political (or politics-adjacent) stories, unless they are directly tech-relevant - and maybe even then.
I don't flag these stories, but I do think this "fight" is one we'll eventually lose. The majority of users here want to use HN as another Reddit. They don't really care about what made HN different. As such I think it's time for us to accept the new normal. Our party is over.
It's Musk. Rather obviously they're going to try avoiding alienating him as much as possible.
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