Correcting the corruption of the Democrat debt propped up economy of a looting and gambling enterprise for the top 10% while the bottom has seen their economic circumstances decline for the last several decades isn't something that would ever be corrected in two months of Trump's second term. The current "polling" infrastructure... much of the same that said Hillary would win and Harris was ahead... is both unreliable with the explanation for any lower Trump satisfaction being those gaslit by the dishonest Democrat media that could barely report on the miraculous recue of the space station astronaut because of Musk Derangement Syndrome. Story after story of manufacturers committing to moving operations to the US in labor surplus areas have been reported by the honest news, but ignored by the Democrat mainstream media which unfortunately sill hold the keys to the population influence matrix.
The price of energy is falling. The price of eggs are falling. Housing costs are coming down in many parts of the country where they had been inflated by Democrat debt spending.
But low Walmart prices isn't the American dream. Trump is working to restore the REAL American dream for the working class, and the upset, lazy, upper class that has benefited from the mistakes of globalism are going to see some of their wealth transferred back to the working class. It is going to be painful, but the majority knows it and supports Trump in his bold leadership efforts to fix what is broken.
This is the "percentage change in the total debt per GDP per president." That is a disingenuous measure. Trump's debt at the end of his first term was for the pandemic relief at a time when we did not know what would happen with the economy. Then Biden and Democrats added trillions of unnecessary spending. This is the trick that dishonest Democrats use to claim old Quid Pro Joe the cabbage has good performance. Like the stupid "record oil production" when every year for the last 30 years is record oil production. The honest truth is that Old Joe punished oil production so that the trend line never got back to pre-pandemic production and thus we had too little domestic production to support all that Democrat spending that was done.
Biden left us with a $2 trillion budget deficit. National debt is near $40 trillion thanks to out of control Democrat spending during Biden's term. Trump is cutting that and will bring in more revenue from business sector growth.
And here is what is more moronic. Ignoring the claims of the bottom 80% that economic circumstances suck... pulling data like this out of your ass. How did that work for the last election? The definition of insane is doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result. Are you in a safe upper class liberal enclave on the coast or big city? Maybe you should drive out to the rust belt and other areas of the country that voted for Trump as see how things are going.
Not a Democrat, but the middle class has been getting schtuped by the right and the left for ages, and the fact is the best way to grow the economy is to put more in the pockets of the middle class. To pretend the GOP cares about reducing the deficit is patently laughable. Reissue a tax cut where almost 50% of the benefits go to the wealthiest 1% and big corporations? Blow the deficit out another 5 to 15T over the next decade? LOL. Go to the Manhattan Institute and read "A Comprehensive
Federal Budget Plan to Avert a Debt Crisis" if you want to know how to settle the debt crisis.
No, what you strip out is the trust fund debt. I used to equate it to the old Christmas Club accounts at the bank, but it's not even that. In the end, there is a reason why those trust funds hold "non-marketable" debt. They are promises with no real obligation to pay. They don't have the "full faith and credit" backing of publicly-issued Treasuries.
Ugh. Not all AI is equal. They aren't always correct. And, they lie. Please look it up if you don't believe me. These numbers aren't useful or correct.
This is a false premise. There exists a Grand Canyon sized valley, between returning tax dollars to the people who earned them , and the federal government wasting billions to fund 3rd world sex changes, DEI governance to Syrians, as they slay 600K of their own people, and to study if cocaine, makes monkeys more interested in sex.
Ditto for NGOs paying armies of executives $600K each, in Central Texas, to hand kids to unvetted hosts, some of who sex traffic them. Not all federal debt, or spending, is equal.
None of this is remotely true, nor useful for the argument. It is misinformation and if your party regime standards were put in place, you would be canceled and banned for posting it.
Here is a tip for you that I use. If you want to make a quality argument, use the data from reliable sources. For example, go to sources that conflict with your worldview. If you find answers there that back your claims, it is platinum. Otherwise it is likely crap.
How many do you think read such things and actually comprehend them? What is understood is that this is a new day and past performance, as they,don' insure future success or failure.
What that chart you cut and pasted actually shows is the increase in debt, ie deficit, and what percentage that increase is. Not total debt, but percentage of increase in deficit spending.
Most spending legislation is over 10 years anyway so the massive tax cuts by Bush are still sending us into debt during Obama and were made permanent by him. We borrow money to give tax cuts.
If your goal is to persuade people to see the problems in the way you want them to, then your presentation needs to be much less paranoid and conspiratorial.
We find this kind of analysis by you to be off-putting. We don't want to be in the same political party that is reflected in this thinking. It's not convincing at all.
I am a 1 per center that loves capitalism. It is you fake capitalist that probably get your current income as taxed capital gains that are screwing yourself ignoring the facts and truths.
I don't think you are wanted in the party of patriots with that hypertensive tendency. Note that there was an election. The people have spoken. And clearly you are not in sync with that message.
I repeat my comment. We voted for Trump but, because he's become crazy, and has crazy people supporting him who are paranoid and conspiratorial, we will not vote Republican again.
Do you think, as a political matter, Americans, including working class Americans and low turnout voters that put Trump over the top, will tolerate higher prices on a gamble that tariffs across the board will bring jobs back to America?
It remains to be seen about tariffs and prices. Correct me if I'm wrong but your comment suggests that you didn't take Econ 101, or if you did that you have forgotten some important material.
A tariff is a tax. The ability of a seller to pass through a tax depends critically on the price elasticity of demand for what's being taxed, which further is influenced by the availability and price of substitutes. This is why, for example, when gasoline and diesel jumped during the Biden years, miles driven only declined slightly. (Some decline was covid-related; declines on account of pricing were slight, maybe 3%.)
Now compare that, for instance, to eggs. The run-up in those prices from bird flu caused demand to fall by 12%. For other products, elasticities are higher because, for instance, if the price of my favorite rye whiskey goes out of sight, I can switch to Wild Turkey. If brand name "whitening" toothpaste gets cheeky, I can make sure to look on the bottom shelf where the price for the generic is lower. Steaks get too expensive? Hey kids, isn't this meat loaf tasty? Tomorrow night we're having spaghetti! And so on.
The latest iPhone out of China gets a 25% tariff? My guess is that the producer and/or Apple will be eating a fair bit of margin in the form of special deals for cellphone customers. How about Canadian tar sands? That stuff already sells at a 15%-20% discount because the stupid Canucks allowed their sanctimonious environmentalists to at least partly block a pipeline to the Pacific coast. Add a 25% tariff, knowing that there's a 6-month lead time to stop production and that Alberta cannot store very much, and what do you think will happen?
Think about French wine. These days, I am a Manhattan swilling dog, but when it comes to wine I have a soft spot for them Frogs. But will I pay $125 for a $50 bottle? I don't think so. Oregon makes a dang good pinot, come to think of it. The Anderson Valley of California is good at sparkling wine. I don't think the French can swallow the whole tariff, but they'll swallow as much as they can.
Thanks for the comment. Yes, I get tariffs are a tax (paid by U.S importers), but I think your comment suggests that they might not have much of an impact on prices due to the elasticity of certain goods. Is that right?
Correct. It will depend on the scope of the tariffs and any responses. The United States has been the consumer of last resort for a very long time, to the point where export-driven economies and their leaders don't even realize it anymore. Or take it for granted, figuring that our media will scare us into compliance.
Take Canada, for instance. About one-quarter of their economy depends on exports to the United States, while <5% of ours depends on exports to Canada. The Canadian economy rests mainly on resource extraction. They are kinda sorta the Beverly Hillbillies with an attitude. Time to call the Clampetts by their real name, I'd say.
True, the tariffs can put the hurt on some American car manufacturers for a while, but they'll get over it and move whatever is there to here. I think it's time to impress upon the citizens of Canada that we like them, but that whether they know it or not, their leaders are pirates with a smile and we're no longer going to put up with it. USD-CAD is now 1.43. Anyone for 2.50?
The EU is much more dependent on us than we are on them. They are masters at drafting communiques in elegant French (the language of diplomacy for its ambiguity) and then translating them into English, but the reality is that the U.S. pays 70% of NATO's bills and is shut out of many of their markets.
This is no longer 1948. Time for Europe to stand on its own two feet. Maybe that will impel Germany to reconsider its ongoing industrial suicide on the altar of anthropogenic global warming. Or maybe not. We shall see. There isn't much that the U.S. can't produce by ourselves.
I hear you. As I wrote in a comment above, it seems like it’s how you impose tariffs that matter. In the short term, it seems to do more damage than good, even from the data we have from Trump’s first term. Long term it seems more mixed, but even then I don’t know that it’s clear domestic production will increase substantially on all fronts. Plus, there’s always the political question of how much inflation we get, which is always deeply unpopular.
It seems like tariffs that are targeted make the most sense, especially from a national security standpoint in an increasingly dangerous world.
I get text alerts for all the commitments of manufacturers for moving and building manufacturing in the US. There have been quite a few. It is a tide that is building.
There is already headwinds blowing against the economics for overseas manufacturing in that global wages have risen while US wages have stagnated, and ocean shipping costs are also higher. As the US pulls back from the Global Order, the cost of ocean freight insurance is skyrocketing. One sunk tanker or cargo ship in the Red Sea by Iran proxies is going to blow it up.
The threat of Trump tariffs is already having an accelerated impact on many pending decisions for a lot of companies. My wife just purchased a Genesis QV70. South Korean car manufactured in Alabama. We are going to see more and more of that. The Trump administration is pushing these businesses to locate in labor surplus areas. Rural areas. Promise Zones, etc.
And we already have out of control inflation without the tariffs, so there is a problem with corporate consolidation and a lack of competition that needs to be fixed. Tariffs take away the advantage of the massive multinationals that can locate their manufacturing overseas.
I understand the rationale, and I am sympathetic to some of protectionism (protecting certain industries, say, such as ones that affect national security). I think you can defend tariffs against China much more than you can against Canada and Mexico or the EU. Having strained relations with our allies isn’t wise, and I think Trump is mistaken to think a trade deficit means we are losing. Some countries make things and have access to resources that we don’t have and vice versa, and good trade agreements capitalize on that for all countries involved, you know?
The U.S. certainly has leverage, but I think the wiser course of action would be to renegotiate trade deals with these allies that are perhaps more favorable to us, especially to avoid reciprocal tariffs and a trade war, which will be costly.
Some of the data from tariffs in Trump’s first term are negative. Manufacturing ended up in the negative overall in relation to the tariffs, even after accounting for the slight increase in employment. In other words, the incentive to build more at home doesn’t always pan out, and if we get increased inflation on top of that, well, that’s no good.
But let’s see. I care about wages and good jobs for working class Americans, especially those really left behind. I just think there is a more responsible approach than the current one, and I think the uncertainty regarding business investment will be problematic too if Trump doesn’t stick with the policy.
Too many people seem to think that this is the 1950s or '60s, when the U.S. was the economic Colossus of Rhodes, responsible for 40% of the world's economic output. In fact, the U.S. is now responsible for only about 12% of world industrial production.
The idealists have welcomed a "multi-polar world" in their rhetoric, but not in their strategic thinking. Do any of these people, who include the Democratic AND Republican "thinkers" in Washington, D.C., who are prone to granting far too much weight to people whose reputations were inflated to begin with and who haven't had an original idea in decades, have pondered the implications?
Understand this: The share of world trade denominated in dollars has been nearly cut in half in the past decade, exacerbated by the foolish Biden administration's sanctions against Russia that only drove them toward the Chinese, India, and the Iranians. Biden's people didn't come out and say it, but they operated as if this was 1965, which it is not.
In a multi-polar world, the U.S. will not for long be able to trade surplus dollars for goods without paying an increasingly risky price. "Protectionism" is no longer a matter of importing cheap shirts from Bangladesh or taking in spiffy BMWs made in Germany, soon to be made in China. The tradeoffs are increasingly critical. The world has never operated on kumbaya and love, and it's time that BOTH parties understood it.
Donald Trump is crude and undisciplined in his rhetoric, but he's not wrong about the fundamentals. The time grows short.
I hear you on the change in the world economy. However, I think free trade insofar as it benefits us and others is still the ideal way to go. Still, the world is more dangerous now, and we have to be self sufficient in some ways, especially in national security. Plus, the workers who had jobs that were hollowed out in sectors like manufacturing with the promise they would have new jobs in the new world order, I think we owe to them protectionist policies to look out for them and prevent that from happening again. It seems to me some of those original ideas, like on free trade, still hold value, though.
Regarding Biden’s sanctions on Russia, I don’t think doing nothing to try to punish it for its invasion of Ukraine was an option. Yes, they did clever workarounds, and if they want to ally themselves with other dictator countries, particularly China, go for it. But all the more reason for us to ally with countries that champion democracy, and all the more reason to make sure our tariff policies are strategic, wise, and don’t lead to reciprocal tariffs and a trade war. That is not in our national interest, which is what worries me regarding what’s going on now with tariff policy against Canada, Mexico, and the EU.
Covid. I keep putting this in the comments. Covid changed everything for many people, and I was one of them. Before covid I had not realized how profoundly incompetent, dishonest and authoritarian our bureaucracy and our government can be. . I was sick with covid early on, and I am 63. It was a bad flu. Many of my friends got it too. We all realized the sinister insanity of what was going on. We saw the Great Barrington Declaration slandered and then ignored. It changed us forever. Red pilled.
We don't want a world where experts whose whole life is looking for epidemics, and who have massive conflicts of interest, can turn human civilization upside down. And then mandate new untested mrna shots. Never again.
Mixed feelings here. Mostly negative toward Fauci Inc., which covered up the Wuhan origins. It's telling that Biden pardoned him.
In my rural county, the first "covid victim" was a guy who fell off his roof and broke his neck. His blood tested positive, and I have no doubt that the hospital scarfed up the bounty. A neighbor spent 10 days in the hospital with myocarditis from the vaxx, life-flighted to Seattle. A friend's wife in Massachusetts had serious complications from the vaxx. Another friend in North Dakota was barred from visiting his father in a nursing home until he dared them to call the police. They didn't.
On the other side of it, one of my spouse's cousins refused the vaxx, and died of covid at the age of 60, with no contributing factors that I know of. I was vaxxed and boostered once, and got it (as did my spouse) after the booster, and again last fall. Mild cases.
The masks never protected the wearers. Big increases in respiratory problems among retail workers who had to wear them all day. The media never mentioned any of it. They censored the truth about HCQ and Ivermectin, and so did Twitter and Facebook. The social media organizations were abject failures, and worse. Facebook, in particular, is still politically censored. Nothing in the media about vaxx reactions or much higher rates of premature death among the vaxxed. Kids were vaxxed even though hardly any kids get covid, and the death rate is vanishingly small.
Covid did a real number on our rural schools. They still haven't fully recovered from what that did to student discipline. Remote learning was a joke. Anyone recall Obama's "rural broadband initiative" and Biden's renewal of the same with much more money? Um, that's another story, so the short one is that it was and remains a complete fraud. If that whole thing comes up in the comments maybe I will tell that story.
For starters, I think the Democrats have it wrong on climate change. Trump, in his ham-fisted way, has called it a hoax. He's somewhat correct, if we understand climate change to mean the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, i.e., the idea that carbon dioxide emissions from human activity have caused the earth's temperatures to rise.
This just isn't the case. A year and a half ago, Statistics Norway definitively debunked that idea. Naturally, their analysis got no media attention. The warming since the end of the Little Ice age is within the range of natural variability.
Progressives love to ignore, disparage, and smear heterodoxy, all while preaching nuance and critical thinking. Until someone practices it, at which point they become Nazis, idiots, trailer trash, racists, and dupes. We are told that the AGW hypothesis is "settled science," when in fact science is never truly settled. Still, the Dems have pushed some extremely expensive and unreliable alternatives, solar and wind being the biggies, the result being an increasingly fragile power grid and skyrocketing utility rates.
There is much more to say about this, but I'll close this comment by saying that Democrats have positioned themselves directly against the standard of living. Not the way to win, that's for sure.
If you get time, that link to the Statistics Norway paper is in English and it is by far the single most definitive thing I have ever read about the subject. Human-caused climate change is, to me, almost entirely a secular religion.
Man, Ruy, you have my utmost respect. You are willing, as so few are, to actually get into the serious problems of the Democrat Party. As a historian, I very much see similarities to the Whigs---unable or unwilling to address the key issue of the day (illegal immigration), while offering no countervailing issues that might peel away voters. And I don't know what those issues would be. But there are these major civil wars going on inside the Dem Party that haven't even been addressed, and must be for the party to survive---and I'm not talking thrive or win elections, but avoid being the next "Know-Nothings" or "Liberty Party:"
1) The ongoing illegal alien/inner city resident civil war. People such as Noah Smith and some on your blog have identified this as a "good management" problem. NO. It's a fundamental disconnect with the voters about who is an American. Until Democrats get this right, they will continue to see the flight from cities/blue states and erosion of black/hispanic support from cities as their LEGAL benefits are redirected to alien invaders. And that must be the language, I'm sorry to say. IF Democrats continue to portray them as just "job seekers," there is no hope.
2) The ongoing civil war between the Hamas/Palestinian wing of the Democrat Party and the Israel/Jewish wing. The sad truth is short of actual violence against Jews, there is nothing the Party can do to drive Jewish voters from the Party. However, the very bad news is that millions of Christians identify with Israel as the birthplace of their religion and an area given to the Jews. THOSE are the ones you will lose. People such as Omar and Tlaib are NOT viewed as "diverse" but as virtual terrorists who hate America, and this is a huge, huge problem for the Democrats.
3) The latest one, which even you don't realize or discuss, is AI vs. Green. The whole green transition is deader than the Avengers series. But AI is the new kid on the block, is embraced by EVERYONE, and . . . sucks energy like nothing ever before. There is no scenario on earth in which green and AI coexist. It is drill, baby, drill. And the techhies are slowly moving to the GOP because that is the only place they will find energy.
4) There is actually a new civil war brewing, again, ignored. The DOGE revelations show how utterly corrupt the NGOS (which are overwhelmingly Democrat) are and how much money not only is wasted but is criminally directed against the USA. This will be the toughtest one to overcome. Think of the rump Democrats who stayed with the Union in 1862. It would take a group like that, surviving about 10 years while steadily moving to real-world solutions---not woke, green, ESG, DEI kinds of stuff---to survive. I suggest a Democrat Hill group that actually URGES cutting gubment, firing the members of the Deep State, and even prosecuting people like John Brennan and James Comey. You'd be shocked at how fast people would come to your side.
Oh, and the economy won't save you. Inflation dropped by 50%, mfg and industrial production surged by DOUBLE what was expected, and before it's done, DOGE is gonna slash the debt itself.
...Look Larry, the effort is always welcome, but to an impartial observer there are a host of reasons to doubt your capacity as a historian, no offense. This goes back to your claim to expertise on the subject of Chinese history, of which you have subsequently demonstrated little grasp of, whether it be ancient or modern.
Then you do things like claim that the primary concern of the tech titans when it comes to AI is energy production...which is a pretty clear indicator that you don't really understand how AI works or what powers it. Which in turn makes it fairly dubious you understand the underlying dynamics of the AI race. Which, again, makes the depth of your historical understanding likewise dubious.
True historical understanding comes from trying to comprehend the holistic whole of the historical data about a time period...not assembling a selection of historical facts around a predefined narrative. And at the moment, you seem to be engaged in the latter, not the former.
He was saying that the tech titans are somehow changing their allegiances out of concern about energy consumption, when that is a distant secondary concern of theirs, compared to other issues, which are their primary motivating factor--something that is obvious to anyone who understands how AI works and how the tech titans get their massive neural nets to function optimally.
BINGO! Hell of sales pitch, isn't it? And this is a party controlled by progressives who show every sign of thinking that they are smarter than everyone else. You know what? I want them to tell us where they get their mushrooms, so I can hear in colors too.
I think there are two basic skillsets: abstract and social. Progressives are abstract thinkers, and they don't think about sales. If anything, they view "sales" as an educational opportunity. Which has become highly annoying.
I am a fan of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, which is rooted in Jungian psychology. The MBTI is controversial; some think of it as voodoo with no more validity than a horoscope, but I don't dismiss it because when I took the test 40 years ago without knowing anything about it and got the results ("INTJ"), I thought wow, it's as if someone has been following me around with a clipboard.
Now, after much more experience in life, one thing I realize is that anything is just a slant, or a construct, and that no "answers" are definitive. They are only attempts at understanding, and should be seen that way: as attempts. Even if I don't agree, or even if I do agree, no one gets it "right" or "wrong," but they should be seen as "serious" or maybe "foolish," but the serious ones should be taken seriously even if I end up rejecting them, an example of the latter being Modern Portfolio Theory.
(I am going over the woods and through the hills here, but I promise to get to grandma's house, and hope it will be worth it.)
MPT was invented by a Nobel Prizewinner or maybe two of them in the 1950s, and purports to construct an optimally efficient mix of stocks that eliminates risk. In business school, I dismissed it and still do because it rests on "beta," which looks at a stock's past performance relative to the market, and allows the believer to arrive at a diversified portfolio whose individual fluctuations will offset each other and eliminate risk.
The problem, as I saw it, was that beta looks backward, and implicitly assumes that the future will replicate the past. I raised my hand and challenged the professor on it, and he replied that, right or wrong, MPT and its companion, the Efficient Market Hypothesis which holds that a stock's price incorporates all information, is nevertheless worthy of close study because they are serious.
It took me time to see that he was correct. You should study serious ideas for their insights, even if flawed. The same goes for the MBTI and its extension, the Enneagram, which essentially put human beings into 16 personality types, a mixture of introversion/extraversion, intuitive/literal "sensing," thinking/feeling, and scheduled/spontaneous.
Now grandma's house: I can't agree with a generality about how progressives think. We all put people into categories. It's a human trait based on pattern recognition, which I think is fundamental to intelligence and not just human. As with any fundamental trait, pattern recognition has positive and negative aspects. It's necessary for survival, but it can lead anyone seriously astray too.
So, as much as we depend on pattern recognition, we have to be aware of its limitations. This is true of many of our traits, both universal and individual. For instance, I am a born arithmetic wiz. I love numbers and statistics, but I am aware of their limitations, one being that quantification, as powerful as it is, can't measure everything so I remind myself to try to remember that there are equally powerful realities that cannot be quantified: love, hate, fear, hunger, emotional attraction and repulsion among other things.
We live in a scientific, mechanical, engineering society, and one consequence is specialization, which underlies economics. Yet, without the generalists, we're lost. I routinely lampoon the generalistic liberal arts graduates of Eastern finishing schools, and with (in my opinion) good reason. The progressives are too heavily tilted in that direction. Too many of them are political scientists, and not nearly as skilled as they think they are. The bowels of the Democratic Party, and many of its rank and file, are filled with bulls--- poly sci students. Ugh.
As a group, I think they tend to be too heavily emotional, and this INTJ (a type sometimes called "the analyst") laments the exclusion of hard-headed, pragmatic, cold-heated analysis. Progressives are susceptible to fads in my view, and fail when they don't apply rigorous tests, in essence the scientific method, to their conclusions. Yet, a world full of INTJs would be a scary one, which is why the dawn of artificial intelligence, aka artificial stupidity, worries me.
In reality, I think the 16 types are distributed throughout society, with conservatives tending more toward the hard-headed but certainly not exclusively so. Therefore, in grandma's living room, they're all present. Maybe it would help if people would do more to recognize the limitations of their inclinations and of the mental tools they hold dear, including pattern recognition without which we'd all be dead.
Damn, this was a long comment. LOL
p.s.: Modern Portfolio Theory led to "portfolio insurance," and was commercialized in the 1990s. It failed spectacularly in 1998, when it led to the Asian financial crisis that year.
p.p.s.: The Bible, being a compilation, is by definition a mixed bag, which is an eternal strength and a major weakness. I am a huge fan of Ecclesiastes, especially 1:9 (nothing new under the sun) and Chapter 3 (a season for everything, or as the Byrds sang it, "Turn, Turn Turn.")
This is the season for hard realities, the season of "no." So was the 1940s; was there ever a more vivid "no" than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subesquent American threat to annihilate the rest of Japan if they didn't surrender? Other times, the 1930s and the 1950s being examples, were seasons of "yes." The Great Society of the '60s was a "yes" taken too far, and the moon landing of 1969 was the greatest "yes" ever.
Re MPT, 99.999% of the time "alpha" is just leveraged beta.
And everything correlates when the shit hits the fan.
Michael Shellenberger's article about Marc Andreeson's experience with the Biden Admin and AI is interesting. It demonstrates why Big Tech embraced Trump. The Progressive need for control loomed large. Good read.
Exactly. MPT and the companion EMH promise something they cannot deliver, the automatic hedging of risk through non-correlation, which rests on beta, which is a way of straight-lining the past into the future. Then comes the Black Swan. Just when you think it'll all be Candygrams, the Land Shark rings the doorbell. In the end, some things cannot be automated. This to me, is also the potential Achilles Heel of "artificial intelligence."
I saw the interview (or article about?) Andreeson. Excellent stuff.
You'll get a kick out of this. I met the Dean from my B0-school in the early 2000s, and started to ask him about the EMH, and he said " do you mean does anyone believe it anymore?"
Americans have long been suspicious of the Democratic Party's mindless accommodations for of divisive, stupid even dangerous Leftist idealogy like gender identification and transformation or lawfare weaponization of the judiciary. The most charitable interpretation of Democratic intent is that the Party has placed winning elections above any and all other considerations or obstacles, including real science and the U.S. Constitution.
Now, its silence, even cheering, in the face of domestic terrorists torching Tesla electronic vehicles and vandalizing dealerships, the party is showing its openness to stopping Elon Musk and, its real target, Donald Trump, by any means necessary, including notably lawlessness and violence.
There may be no rehabilitating nor rebuilding of a Democratic Party wholly owned by fringe radical Marxists.
In an interview with NBC News' "Meet the Press," Sen. Bernie Sanders said "Vice President Kamala Harris' changing views are part of "doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election."
How do the democrats get past that truth? You can voice changes all you want, but if people don't believe you are sincere, then it does no good. With potential candidates like slick Newsome and wacko Walz out there every day acting like a clown, the Democrats chance of turning everything around is slim to none.
Revelations every day of the corruption and duplicity of the biden administration will keep the Dems down for a long time. Unless a way is found to sever biden from the party. Whether or not the revelations of biden's deceit and misappropriations of funds are true or false doesn't matter any more. The Dems are to the point where it is assumed the worse rather than best.
Trump hasn't been in office in 100 days. The Dem party bamboozled it's identity group voters for 60 years. Now they have wised up and left the party. How do you get them back? As an Independent that voted for Trump, if I were asked today if I thought the economy was going in the right direction could just as easily say no as yes. But that question is a Red Herring. If I were asked if the economy was going to get better, I'd say you bet it is. The last point is, polls maybe indicate the "what" but they don't delve very deep into "why". They leave that up to pundits who are mostly the same pundits before the election. Some have adapted well, the Liberal Patriot is one of them. Late night shows, MSNBC, CNN, NBC or the rest of the major media do not help help your cause. They need to change or be cut off, turned off. The comments from the left in our local newspapers indicate the lower rank and file have no interest in finding good candidates or more people orientated policies. Just insults cut and pasted from before the election.
But to me the biggest obstacle for the Dems is the solid belief, that Bernie was right. And you will never overcome that stigma while the CAs, NYs, COs and Chicagos/IL continue on their current path. Pritzkter is a loser. He should neutered ASAP. He doesn't understand the basic new truth that bases don't win elections. Something as simple as they will assist ICE with illegal criminals could be a great start as a game changer. The Dems would be seen as changing such unpopular positions and really mean it. As it stands, every time I see big blue cities in the news what I think are Curt Russell's escape movies. We should just put barriers around sanctuary cities and leave them to their own destruction.
you just wrote what I was about to say... Harris claiming to move to the middle, well no one, or very few, believed that one. If she would have been elected, she would have gone as far left, as quickly as she could.
I've voted independent for the past several elections & was going to again this time. But on the day I was going to go vote early, I read on another site, a guy who posts very biased stuff, a link to Axios saying nearly half of Trump voters may have to resort to violence if Trump should lose. I followed the link.
That made me so angry. I posted he should revise that & say OVER half of Republicans do NOT think they should resort to violence. Bill, the owner of the site, refused to budge. I left the house, intending to vote independent, but voted for Trump. Bill said he likes to think he influences his readers, but never in that way. Hmmm, so lefties, perhaps watch what ya say/write??? Don't exaggerate/embellish/incite hatred/look down on us dummies...
Before that day, I had been confronted by people on numerous times when I refused to say who I was going to vote for. They automatically assumed I was going to vote for Trump & they very directly told me I HAD to vote for Harris or I was voting for Hitler.
Oh, & the identity voters have caught on, perhaps. Not all Republicans hate people of color, or gays, etc. My motto for YEARS has been: there's nothing worse than a conservative bigot, unless it's a liberal hypocrite
It is still the economy, stupid! Stocks have plunged. So has consumer and business confidence. Forecasters expect slower growth, higher unemployment and faster inflation. Trumpanomics is rapidly digging its own hole.
I have never liked Trump's citations of the stock market, and I like the Democrats' citations even less. To me, the latter illustrates the degree to which the Democrats have divorced themselves from the working middle class that they once represented but no longer do. On Main Street, people do not spend the S&P 500. They spend what is in their wallet, fer chrissakes.
Of course, the people who run the Democratic Party don't have household budgets. Rich people don't pay attention to the little stuff. They don't have to decide whether to pay the electric bill or the car insurance, and watch grocery prices not for politics but for what they can afford this week. They watch the stock market, and pretend about the rest, like Walz pretended to be a bird hunter but didn't even know how to hold a shotgun.
Kids, it's about jobs and income. Democrats lost last year mainly because unemployment rose during the crucial second quarter of a presidential election year. There is a very solid relationship between the direction of the 2Q unemployment rate and the November results. Only once since World War II has an incumbent party's presidential candidate won if unemployment rose during the spring of an election year. Inflation sure didn't help.
Until just lately, progressives were joyous at the rising price of eggs, or so it sure looked. Aha! Gotcha! You ruined breakfast, evil Nazi Republicans. Oops, guess what? On March 3, the wholesale price was $8.17 a dozen. Yesterday, it was $3.03. In only a bit more than two weeks, egg prices at wholesale are down 63%. The reason: Bird flu is abating. Retail prices will be coming down soon. Progressives will be disappointed. Trump will claim credit.
So what now? Agitate for the rights of Venezuelan gangsters. Revel in the firebombing of Tesla dealers. Argue for the advocates of Hamas on campuses. As someone who voted Democrat in the first 10 presidential elections of my voting history and who went write-in for the last three, I ask progressives the same thing I asked Republicans 15 years ago: What in hell are you FOR?
A big problem (of many) with the Democrats is their widespread belief, not just among their ruling progressives but here too, is that they can fix this with "messaging."
Uh-uh. Not hardly. Democratic Party "messaging" of the past was forged in the crucible of the New Deal and ratified by the sweeping victory of World War II, augmented by the Great Society. Still true now; when all else fails scare 'em about Social Security.
Democrats can make proposals, but the fiscal realities preclude anything sweeping. As for the "messaging," the progressive stranglehold precludes anything meaningful there. See what happens to any major Democrat who says something like, "You know what? I don't think biology has changed since I learned in seventh grade that we are mammals, and that mammals come in two sexes."
You're conflating 'messaging' with 'signaling support for policies XYZ'.
But the thing is, it doesn't matter if you support the most popular policies in American history if you can't get the message out. Case in point, the CHIPs act accomplished more for the working class in terms of re-shoring manufacturing than anything Trump has ever done--but the working class never heard about it.
Why? Because the Democrats' messaging strategies are not optimized for the current informational environment, and the realities of the attention economy. They are still campaigning like its 2008--but the media landscape is completely different than 2008. Right now the Republicans have the edge here.
But it will not last forever. When the party's messaging apparatus adjusts, it will be well-placed to lead an anti-MAGA backlash. (there is always a backlash--never forget your dialectics) Especially once Trump does them the favor (and the country the disservice) of losing Cold War 2.0.
Why do you think the GOP brass is constantly saying "keep your eye on AOC"? It's not because of her policies, many of which aren't super popular. It's because they know it's not *really* about policy--and because they know she understands the current media environment, and how to message in it.
True, you should never hide the light under a bushel. But you (not you personally, but a political party) should not let the tail wag the dog either. First comes the work, then comes the "messaging."
What I see from the Democrats is back-asswards on that. They show every sign of thinking that all they need to do is come up with new wording. Uh-uh, no way.
"Cage free" is a joke. The overwhelming majority of eggs come from indoor egg factories. Anyone who thinks that "cage free" chickens don't still live in cages deserves to be laughed at.
Out here in the countryside -- the America that the movers and shakers in the Democratic Party are scared of and angry about because they cannot control it -- there are actually pasture chickens. They don't "free range" as much as the geniuses think they do. Why? Because the coyotes will break their little necks and eat them, and then the eggs. Egg-suckin' dogs!
Shoot coyotes like my neighbor (who lives with his wife in a double-wide and voted for Sanders in the '16 primary and Trump in the general) does with his 7mm rifle at 300 yards with only iron sights? What's that? Guns? Ban them! Poor coyotes!
Our eggs cost us $5/dozen. The egg lady down the road drops them off personally at our house, and we love her. She has not changed her prices. Anyone want to guess what happens in spring? I'll tell you: The more light, the more eggs. The egg lady's chickens are laying like crazy, and she's donating a lot of them to the food bank. Who knew? Not the Democrats.
Weekly egg production nationally is now 5% higher than it was at this time a year ago. Bird flu is subsiding, at least in those egg factories. Demand is down 12% because there is price elasticity. Democrats, as a group, either didn't take Econ 101 or got gentleperson's Cs, and don't have a clue.
Boy oh boy are they going to be peeved when retail egg prices start crashing at the grocery store.
Dan - I recommend you buy a used Tesla from a liberal neighbor who may have bought it as a status symbol. It is a great car. Your neighbor can then buy another EV brand.
I live in America and I'm afraid to drive a car because of left wing lunatics. This violence is supported by the likes of Tim Walz, who is prancing around chortling about destroying an American company with American workers. Late night t.v. audience whooped and hollered and cheered about fire-bombed Tesla dealership. Vote Dem? No way.
Even though retired with not to far to go most the time, I’ll drive an EV after the government gives me one. That was my greatest disappointment of joe. Barack gave out phones, Joe should have given out EVs.
The short story on that one is that EVs are viable urban commuter cars today. In a decade or so (watch me be wrong on the timing), they will be viable anywhere vehicles. By 2040 or so, I doubt that you'll even be able to buy a new ICEV. They will go the way of oil lamps, propjets for anything but short-range commercial air travel, and incandescent light bulbs for anything other than specialized uses.
This is not a political statement, or any kind of EVangelism at all. This is pure engineering. Today's batteries use a liquid electrolyte. Once the solid-state batteries come online and then ride down the manufacturing scale economy cost curve, driving ranges will triple or more, and the other downsides of EVs will be history.
This is purely engineering to me, always has been, and always will be.
I talked to a representative from a solar panel company for solar for my house. I like the idea. With all the rebates etc it was affordable. Problem is, at my age, a 20 to 30 year stretch to recoup my investment was not practical. Nor was it all the practical. I drive used Toyotas. Made in America. Semi expensive to buy and fix but if you don't have to fix them often then it becomes a good deal. I also have a lot electrical toys etc. Not to many need to fixed becasue it is cheaper just to buy a new one. I hear the same applies to EVs. And I don't forget that one has to add an expensive charging system to ones home adding more things that could need to be fixed, and living in Nebraska, cold weather is bad for EVs so it adds to the cost and lack of reliability. One thing the biden administration was not good at, or maybe they never tried, was trying to predict the consequences of their actions. Their plan for EVs was never practical or realistic. Such as, who was going to buy all the citizens who couldn't afford the EVs. Buy used ones? The lack of battery life past about 10 years becomes to expensive to make them practical for the poor and middle class.
Whether or not I could afford one is irrelevant. It is whether or not I chose to waste my money on one. I have a good friend who owned one. It was stolen and by the time she got it back it was going to, cost $17,000 to fix and an ungodly amount of time before it could be fix. She sold hers, bought a gas car, and said good riddance. Your argument is neither here nor there for me. It has no relevance to my life like most ordinary Americans. Especially if the Dem party, controlled by elites and the rich, are trying to cram them down our throats.
"Expensive charging stations" make me laugh. Hard. They remind me of the car salesman in the Fargo movie selling clear coat treatment. Sure, if you're a sucker you can get one. Or you can have someone wire up a 240-volt outlet. Or you can stick a splitter on the outlet for your electric dryer and run an extension cord.
A level 2 (i.e. 240v, 32A) EV charging cord goes for $100 on Amazon. A 50-foot 240v, 32A extension cord goes for $68. A splitter goes for $40. Voila! $208 total. Feel free to spend more if money is burning a hole in your pocket. There are only two reasons why people get those charging stations. One is that sometimes the car company will throw one in for free, at which point you have to spend a bunch of money to have it installed. The other is that all of this is new, and people are sitting ducks for every shyster.
Solar panel economics are a function of your electric rates and your latitude. When I looked into them eight years ago, the net price for the juice after the tax credits was about 14 cents/kWh not including installation. Electricity is cheap where we live, and it didn't pencil out. That's the simple story. There are more factors.
As for used EVs, the key there is to ascertain the condition of the battery. There is a reliable way to do that, but I wonder how many people go that far. Once solid state batteries replace liquid electrolytes (I think 2035 for solid state battery prices to be viable in the mass market, but maybe it'll be sooner), I think the current generation of EVs will be about as valuable as a used "blazing fast" Gateway 386 desktop computer with a "gigantic" 100 MB hard drive. LOL
Funny that Tesla came up. I have a long personal history with EVs. I have never been a Musk worshipper when the progressives passed up no opportunity to shine his knob. Today, I chuckle at the wingnuts who are doing the same, and growl at the progressives who condemn him and cheer the vandalism because Musk committed wrongthink.
Today, I had to drive to Portland for a few errands. 170-mile roundtrip. There's a Tesla showroom along one of the freeway routes, so I got off and went over there. Walked in and said to the gay kid at the counter who was acting as a greeter that I was there to offer support. The place and an outbuilding had boarded-up windows from where shots had been fired in the middle of the night.
I told him that my support had nothing to do with Musk, or "DOGE," or Trump, but I was there because I don't think anyone has any god damned business fucking with him or anyone else there (the place is also a service center) who's doing nothing but working for a living.
On my way out, I added that I don't even really like Teslas, that I had driven one and it was fun, but I wouldn't be a customer. But still, I said, you are working for a living and no one should ever mess with that for any reason.
The goddamned progressives are so arrogant! These are the people who lecture everyone about workers? The hell! There's more to say about EVs, which are one of my three dozen or so "islands of competence" that people develop as they get older, but this comment is already long.
Study: Tesla Makes the Most ‘American’ Cars, Kelly Blue Book.
Cox Automotive released its Q4 and 2024 EV sales report last week, showing estimates of how many EVs were sold by brand and model, and highlighting how many units Tesla is delivering compared to other automakers for another year in a row. Total EV sales in the U.S. grew 7.3 percent year over year, amounting to a little over 1.3 million units—of which Tesla sold 633,762, or 48.7 percent.
Tesla’s total sales amounted to more than double those of the rest of the top 10 EVs sold in 2024, a list which was comprised of vehicles from General Motors (GM), Hyundai, Ford, and Rivian.
Biden hated Elon so much he tipped the scales for Rivian. Tesla got zero subsidies, Rivian received a $6.6B "loan."
"Rivian has received a conditional commitment for a $6.6 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) program to support the construction of its electric vehicle factory in Georgia."
To get elected. All such promises by those running for election should be evaluated for what they say. Did I expect him to do his one day promises on day one! Most of them no. Would he get them done sooner rather than later. Yep.
If we are to evaluate promises for what they say, and his promises are simply bombastic lies, by what logic would these lies support the expectation that he will keep any of his promises at all?
When a used car salesman tells you the engine in a car he wants you to buy is "good as new", and you know he's lying, do you then think to yourself "it's definitely not new, but it's probably close to pretty new"?
Because his principles are to fulfills his promises. Hope. I look at it and evaluate for myself. If you take the word of a salesman you don't trust, the smart move is not deal with them.
Compare to the promises to find the soul of the nation and unite the nation. Obviously neither is with in reach of anyone ever. His principles as he applies them to souls and uniting are not the principles I can agree with or believe he has any tools to do so.
Its always about intuition and critical thinking. Not critical feelings.
Because he is God's own blowhard. That's the downside. The upside is that everyone knows it, so they don't hold him to the outrageous promises. It was said in 2016 -- true then, true now -- that his opponents take him literally but not seriously, while his supporters take him seriously but not literally.
In '16, I wrote in Vermin Supreme because at least he admitted that he was a clown. In '20, I wrote in Kanye West because he made no bones about being crazy. In '24, I wrote in Kanye again and added P. Diddy for VP, because both major party candidates were just as insulting. Anyone who thought Trump would end inflation on Day 1 is exactly who P.T. Barnum was talking about when he remarked that a sucker is born every minute.
By the way, eggs were $4.50 a dozen at Costco today. The wholesale price is down by 63% since March 1st, and I think the next Costco run in a few months will see eggs at $3. The Democrats are going to have to find something else to whine about.
The economy is definitely a problem for Republicans. It will recover by 2028 but maybe not by 2026. Remember 1981 and how painful that was and how great 1982 was for the Democrats. The thing you are missing among all the cultural issues is that the Democrats have become the war party. That doesn't often move the needle on elections but sometimes it does. If Trump settles a couple of wars and doesn't start any new ones that is going to be a problem for Democrats. And the Democrats need to ditch the Europeans. Trump and JD are right about that. They are war mongering parasites who don't share our democratic values.
Thus far, there's no actual evidence that there's anything wrong with the economy. Trump's tariff dance has the media nervous, and they are making the public nervous. We shall see.
The Democrats that can win normie voters are the Democrats the party doesn't like. If winning was the only priority, they'd lean on Fetterman and G-Perez. They could have probably gone with the new Gavin Newsome but he governed California badly with his high taxes on productive citizens. I think people would worry he talks a good game but doesn't moderate when in power. I think they have to choose. 1. Keep their "morality" as defined by some definition of good that doesn't align with voters. 2. Moderate on culture while finding a plan that speaks to broad economic plans for everyone making more than $30,000 and less than $250,000 per year. (The other groups have had more than their share of attention)
Less international citizens and more American citizens, not necessarily American first but definitely not America last. And, for goodness sakes, stop creating enemies with every single group of people who isn't classified as "oppressed"
This was a brilliant assessment, but Dems would do themselves a big favor, if they lost the terms "educated " and "uneducated" when referring to voters. When it is 100 degrees outside, and your AC dies, you want a repairperson educated in air conditioning, far more than a Gender Studies grad.
Pre Biden, I find it hard it hard to remember anyone referring to 2/3rds of the US as, "uneducated", but Dems have become very comfortable with the term, the last 4 years. That is somewhat amusing, because while life without semiconductor chips would be hard, life without food, would be impossible.
Dems have a hard time drawing lines. They believe, because the US should not deport, an otherwise law abiding, undocumented 50 year old female maid, we should also never deport male gang members, who rape and murder young girls, before the victims are old enough to visit the feminine hygiene aisle of CVS.
Likewise Dems believe there should be no bail, because the policy discriminates against the poor. So bail reform has allowed violent, accused criminals to wander the streets, pretrial. Where theirmost likely next victims are, almost always, poor, minorities.
And it appears, things may get worse for Dems, before the improve. Much of the so called Dem "woke" problem, is really a hypocrisy problem. Every Dem Senator voted against legislation that would have required public school bathrooms, locker rooms and athletic fields, remain exclusively females spaces. No one mentioned, it is easier to find a live unicorn, than a Dem Senator, with a kid in public school.
Climate Change reeks of the same hypocrisy. A private jet to Davos, says nearly everything that needs to be said, on the subject. Mark Kelly replacing his Tesla with a Tahoe , because he suddenly hates Elon Musk, as Elon rescues stranded US astronauts, says the rest.
Even many "educated" Dems fail to appreciate ,that last time a US Dem President, failed on the level of Biden. Reagan replaced Carter, and Dems wandered the political wilderness for 12 long years, that could have easily been 16. Surely some Dems. recall the failure
The economy is not the stock market, for many people, maybe most people, the economy is the amount they earn versus what they pay out. The job that allows people to earn a wage is immeasurably important to that person.
Support for Trump's handling of the economy is tanking, but most of the people who were on the fence about voting for Trump would still vote the same given a second chance.
Is it tanking? Groceries and gas are coming down in our area, rather noticeably. Brent oil is off nearly $15 bucks a barrel. West Texas is down more than $10 barrel. Nearly everything an American eats, drives, wears, or purchases during the course of a day, is connected to oil.
It has only been 60 days. Should oil settle in the sweet spot for consumers, the lowest cost that allows companies to continue, but not bust, inflation will fall demonstrably .
As much as the usual red meat satisfies the tummies of the alt-right wing of your audience, Ruy, you're not looking beyond the short-run view of the polling, and you're completely leaving out of the dynamics of foreign policy...so you're underestimating the degree to which Trump is currently in the process of sabotaging his party. It's George W. Bush level self-immolation, bumped up several degrees--and we all remember how things looked at the end of Dubya's presidency.
Every American alive right now has grown up with the U.S.'s status as The Great Power as a fundamentally assumed birthright. Built into their psyche since 1945 is the assumption that the U.S. can determine its own fate in the world, and consequently built into their psyche is also a complete intolerance for becoming a 'lesser power' than other countries. That, to them, means they are 'losers'. And they cannot stand looking like 'losers'. At all.
Trump is single-handedly dismantling the basis of the U.S.'s Great Power status. And when Americans have to sit back and watch as the U.S. is helpless to stop the break-up of the dollar zone and the Chinese acquisition of Taiwan...when they are forced to confront the degree to which they have been played by Putin--who has no interest in cooperation with the West--and are now the subordinates of a unified Sino-Russian axis...and when their country has no allies in either hemisphere that trust it enough to cooperate with it...They are going to revile the architect of it all at a scale far worse than their revulsion for Dubya.
The Reagan coalition and the New Deal Democrat coalition was built on the foundations of winning the Second Great War and winning the Cold War. Never will a coalition be built in America on a party, or a leader, that lost the second Cold War.
I recommend listening to the Ezra Klein interview. A very tiny portion of the American electorate cares about foreign policy. Most voters don't even keep up with it and couldn't answer 5 basic questions. They care about what they actually see and experience in daily life. That's it. How do I feel? Is my life good? Is it better now or was it better then? Do I trust these people? I don't know why you think the audience is alt-right. Most of us are old school Democrats who were pushed out or pushed too far. We haven't given up all hope for reform but we probably should.
Not all of the audience is alt-right--and I'm talking about the readership, here, not the authors, who are all mostly center-left--but if you follow the stories on this site, when the authors express left or center-left views, it is greeted with hostility and skepticism in the comments, and does not receive nearly as much attention as when the right is praised, or painted favorably vs the left or center-left. Even when Ruy's inner social democrat peeks out from underneath the Democratic scoldings, nigh every comment is "Great article Ruy, but you're dead wrong on [insert Ruy's social democratic view]."
And no, most voters don't keep up with the *nuances* of foreign policy, but they have always been very attuned to *major foreign policy failures*, and moments when the U.S. 'lost' some global military or economic battle that embarrassed it on the world stage. Most recently, they were angered by what they perceived to be a chaotic pullout of Afghanistan that made the country 'look bad'; they were likewise angered about the failure of the Iraq campaign; Trump provoked rage about the economic rise of China; widespread discontent grew out of Carter's failure to resolve the Iran hostage crisis; they were scandalized by Sputnik--the list goes on.
If you think they won't be similarly stirred to discontent by witnessing a failure to stop the ascendancy of a Eurasian bloc with more power than the U.S., a failure to prevent China from taking Taiwan when it wants, a fall from Great Power status, and--most importantly--the effects of the dollar losing reserve currency status, you'd have to explain away their negative reactions to every other instance of massive foreign policy failure.
You seem to think that we have a choice about this. The Pax Americana is done for. We’re not strong enough to enforce it anymore. Trump seems to be the only person in government who understands this.
There is still a difference between imperfectly upholding the stature of a Great Power whose hegemony is in secular decline and governing in a way that actively sabotages that hegemony and destroys that stature.
That's why Britons still love Churchill, but despise Anthony Eden. And it's why Russians still view Brezhnev favorably, and despise Gorbachev.
And Trump is working very hard on becoming the American Gorbachev right now. Eurasians are appreciative of his dismantling of the West; once the dust settles, Americans will not be. Like I said , they cannot stand looking like "losers"...and losers of Cold War 2.0 they shall likely be, by the time 2028 rolls around.
I would add that Trump’s macho posturing, while irritating, show that he does understand about the loser thing. Determination to fight for our position as a nation, and inspiring the effort and solidarity to do that, is not going to read like “losing” to most Americans.
I guess I see this “imperfect upholding of stature” as a dangerous distraction from the real job of replacing it with something that will ensure our security and prosperity in a world where that hegemony is no longer possible. Once Bush destroyed our moral authority in Iraq, it became Obama’s and Biden’s job to achieve the soft landing. They failed miserably at leading the nation towards this goal, and achieved nothing (or negative-nothing) at such critical tasks as restoring our military and our defense sector to fitness for purpose, building effective ways to resist cultural and information warfare, and addressing our economic and social weaknesses. Nobody is fooled by this vamping we are doing as the global hegemon. In fact, the more we pretend, the weaker we look, and the bolder our enemies become. The big problem the Europeans have is not whether they will defend civilization from the Russians but whether they will not go back to extinguishing each other as they did before the Americans took away all their toys. As Americans, we can and should honor our legacy to the world, to which we gave 80 years of peace and prosperity. We should be unsentimental now about moving to the next stage, which is now urgent.
Several. It is curious you did not dispute any of them--but then again the massive sabotage to the U.S.'s great power status Trump is currently perpetrating is fairly indisputable. It's just happening so fast average Americans haven't yet gotten their head around it. Once they do, though...well, just take a look at what has historically happened to the prospects of either party when they made Americans look like 'losers'.
Same thing. What's your point? You sound like an Ivy League grad student who's done a once-over in this or that PolySci class. Democratic staffer, by chance?
I can't do the comprehension for you. Like I said, I made several points--if you're looking for the first, begin by actually reading the post at the top of the thread, in which I point out that in focusing on the short-run picture painted by polling, while bracketing foreign policy developments, Ruy's analysis is vastly underestimating the degree to which Trump is essentially digging a hole far deeper than any in which his opposition sits. Maintain your reading comprehension for a bit longer and you'll then see flowing from that the explanatory elaboration that this digging consists of Trump's efforts to dismantle the U.S.'s great power status and subordinate the country to a de facto Eurasian hegemon--something which Americans simply won't forgive him for, owing to a long-running American exceptionalist mentality.
Then, if you manage to at last make it to the end, you will arrive here, in this strange but oddly entertaining discursive ouroboros you have put us in, where in order to remind you that you must read a text in order to comprehend it, I wind up giving you cliff notes on a thread you probably should have labored to understand yourself before contributing to.
The core problem for Democrats is their Congressional leadership comes from radically gerrymandered congressional districts or deep blue states. Thus, it's difficult for Democrats to adopt positive General Election messaging. Add in that both parties depend on Wall Street and corporate money elites, and D. C. Democrats can remain very comfortable as the professional minority party.
Correcting the corruption of the Democrat debt propped up economy of a looting and gambling enterprise for the top 10% while the bottom has seen their economic circumstances decline for the last several decades isn't something that would ever be corrected in two months of Trump's second term. The current "polling" infrastructure... much of the same that said Hillary would win and Harris was ahead... is both unreliable with the explanation for any lower Trump satisfaction being those gaslit by the dishonest Democrat media that could barely report on the miraculous recue of the space station astronaut because of Musk Derangement Syndrome. Story after story of manufacturers committing to moving operations to the US in labor surplus areas have been reported by the honest news, but ignored by the Democrat mainstream media which unfortunately sill hold the keys to the population influence matrix.
The price of energy is falling. The price of eggs are falling. Housing costs are coming down in many parts of the country where they had been inflated by Democrat debt spending.
But low Walmart prices isn't the American dream. Trump is working to restore the REAL American dream for the working class, and the upset, lazy, upper class that has benefited from the mistakes of globalism are going to see some of their wealth transferred back to the working class. It is going to be painful, but the majority knows it and supports Trump in his bold leadership efforts to fix what is broken.
This is just moronic. Debt as percentage of GDP by US President:
Franklin D. Roosevelt $178,464,714,660.98 791.8%
791.8%791.8%
Woodrow Wilson $23,036,251,492.50 789.9%
789.9%789.9%
Ronald Reagan $1,604,482,712,041.16 160.8%
160.8%160.8%
George W. Bush $4,217,261,484,712.34 72.6%
72.6%72.6%
Barack Obama $7,663,615,710,425.00 64.4%
64.4%64.4%
George H. W. Bush $1,207,189,695,334.34 42.3%
42.3%42.3%
Donald Trump (first term) $7,804,591,681,202.28 39.2%
39.2%39.2%
Richard Nixon $121,339,561,890.14 34.3%
34.3%34.3%
Joe Biden $8,454,697,079,160.38 30.5%
30.5%30.5%
Jimmy Carter $208,861,000,000.00 29.9%
29.9%29.9%
Bill Clinton $1,262,689,326,747.48 28.6%
28.6%28.6%
Theodore Roosevelt $483,479,337.65 22.6%
22.6%22.6%
Gerald Ford $87,244,000,000.00 16.4%
16.4%16.4%
Herbert Hoover $2,555,913,960.03 15.1%
15.1%15.1%
Lyndon B. Johnson $35,865,507,168.58 11.5%
11.5%11.5%
William Howard Taft $228,827,633.12 8.7%
8.7%8.7%
Dwight D. Eisenhower $20,259,699,209.80 7.6%
7.6%7.6%
John F. Kennedy $16,888,694,386.36 5.8%
5.8%5.8%
Harry S. Truman $422,991,375.50 0.2%
0.2%0.2%
Warren G. Harding −$1,627,743,187.18 −6.8%
−6.8%−6.8%
Calvin Coolidge −$3,646,519,788.06 −17.2%
−17.2%−17.2%
Roosevelt WW2, Wilson WW1 are self-explanatory. Five of the top six are Republicans.
Not sure where you got those numbers but they appear extremely wrong. I use the Federal Reserve, Saint Louis style.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
and obviously they are entirely different. I'd suggest taking a jaundiced eye to whatever your source was cause they're leading you wrong.
Percentage of GDP, which is the best way to tell who is growing the debt most quickly.
Investopedia
Provide the link.
https://www.investopedia.com/us-debt-by-president-dollar-and-percentage-7371225
This is the "percentage change in the total debt per GDP per president." That is a disingenuous measure. Trump's debt at the end of his first term was for the pandemic relief at a time when we did not know what would happen with the economy. Then Biden and Democrats added trillions of unnecessary spending. This is the trick that dishonest Democrats use to claim old Quid Pro Joe the cabbage has good performance. Like the stupid "record oil production" when every year for the last 30 years is record oil production. The honest truth is that Old Joe punished oil production so that the trend line never got back to pre-pandemic production and thus we had too little domestic production to support all that Democrat spending that was done.
Biden left us with a $2 trillion budget deficit. National debt is near $40 trillion thanks to out of control Democrat spending during Biden's term. Trump is cutting that and will bring in more revenue from business sector growth.
And here is what is more moronic. Ignoring the claims of the bottom 80% that economic circumstances suck... pulling data like this out of your ass. How did that work for the last election? The definition of insane is doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result. Are you in a safe upper class liberal enclave on the coast or big city? Maybe you should drive out to the rust belt and other areas of the country that voted for Trump as see how things are going.
Not a Democrat, but the middle class has been getting schtuped by the right and the left for ages, and the fact is the best way to grow the economy is to put more in the pockets of the middle class. To pretend the GOP cares about reducing the deficit is patently laughable. Reissue a tax cut where almost 50% of the benefits go to the wealthiest 1% and big corporations? Blow the deficit out another 5 to 15T over the next decade? LOL. Go to the Manhattan Institute and read "A Comprehensive
Federal Budget Plan to Avert a Debt Crisis" if you want to know how to settle the debt crisis.
I don't know where you got those numbers, but they are completely wrong.
GDP is ~ 21.4T, while the national debt is ~ $34T.
The professionals compare publicly held debt to GDP. We are right at about 100%, more than double what it was at the end of Clinton's second term.
probably correct if you strip out what the Fed holds.
No, what you strip out is the trust fund debt. I used to equate it to the old Christmas Club accounts at the bank, but it's not even that. In the end, there is a reason why those trust funds hold "non-marketable" debt. They are promises with no real obligation to pay. They don't have the "full faith and credit" backing of publicly-issued Treasuries.
Most current GDP is 27.2T.
You obviously don't understand the difference between percentage of GDP and gross numbers.
you are claiming debt to GDP is 30.5%. It isn't.
What is the $8.4T number represent?
Percentage growth in debt. Where is 8.4T?.
Ugh. Not all AI is equal. They aren't always correct. And, they lie. Please look it up if you don't believe me. These numbers aren't useful or correct.
Yeah not from AI. Don't believe it, that's your choice.
This is a false premise. There exists a Grand Canyon sized valley, between returning tax dollars to the people who earned them , and the federal government wasting billions to fund 3rd world sex changes, DEI governance to Syrians, as they slay 600K of their own people, and to study if cocaine, makes monkeys more interested in sex.
Ditto for NGOs paying armies of executives $600K each, in Central Texas, to hand kids to unvetted hosts, some of who sex traffic them. Not all federal debt, or spending, is equal.
None of this is remotely true, nor useful for the argument. It is misinformation and if your party regime standards were put in place, you would be canceled and banned for posting it.
Here is a tip for you that I use. If you want to make a quality argument, use the data from reliable sources. For example, go to sources that conflict with your worldview. If you find answers there that back your claims, it is platinum. Otherwise it is likely crap.
How many do you think read such things and actually comprehend them? What is understood is that this is a new day and past performance, as they,don' insure future success or failure.
Hardly any.
What that chart you cut and pasted actually shows is the increase in debt, ie deficit, and what percentage that increase is. Not total debt, but percentage of increase in deficit spending.
Most spending legislation is over 10 years anyway so the massive tax cuts by Bush are still sending us into debt during Obama and were made permanent by him. We borrow money to give tax cuts.
If your goal is to persuade people to see the problems in the way you want them to, then your presentation needs to be much less paranoid and conspiratorial.
We find this kind of analysis by you to be off-putting. We don't want to be in the same political party that is reflected in this thinking. It's not convincing at all.
I am a 1 per center that loves capitalism. It is you fake capitalist that probably get your current income as taxed capital gains that are screwing yourself ignoring the facts and truths.
I repeat my comment.
I don't think you are wanted in the party of patriots with that hypertensive tendency. Note that there was an election. The people have spoken. And clearly you are not in sync with that message.
I repeat my comment. We voted for Trump but, because he's become crazy, and has crazy people supporting him who are paranoid and conspiratorial, we will not vote Republican again.
So, congratulations! You won!
Good riddance.
Do you think, as a political matter, Americans, including working class Americans and low turnout voters that put Trump over the top, will tolerate higher prices on a gamble that tariffs across the board will bring jobs back to America?
It remains to be seen about tariffs and prices. Correct me if I'm wrong but your comment suggests that you didn't take Econ 101, or if you did that you have forgotten some important material.
A tariff is a tax. The ability of a seller to pass through a tax depends critically on the price elasticity of demand for what's being taxed, which further is influenced by the availability and price of substitutes. This is why, for example, when gasoline and diesel jumped during the Biden years, miles driven only declined slightly. (Some decline was covid-related; declines on account of pricing were slight, maybe 3%.)
Now compare that, for instance, to eggs. The run-up in those prices from bird flu caused demand to fall by 12%. For other products, elasticities are higher because, for instance, if the price of my favorite rye whiskey goes out of sight, I can switch to Wild Turkey. If brand name "whitening" toothpaste gets cheeky, I can make sure to look on the bottom shelf where the price for the generic is lower. Steaks get too expensive? Hey kids, isn't this meat loaf tasty? Tomorrow night we're having spaghetti! And so on.
The latest iPhone out of China gets a 25% tariff? My guess is that the producer and/or Apple will be eating a fair bit of margin in the form of special deals for cellphone customers. How about Canadian tar sands? That stuff already sells at a 15%-20% discount because the stupid Canucks allowed their sanctimonious environmentalists to at least partly block a pipeline to the Pacific coast. Add a 25% tariff, knowing that there's a 6-month lead time to stop production and that Alberta cannot store very much, and what do you think will happen?
Think about French wine. These days, I am a Manhattan swilling dog, but when it comes to wine I have a soft spot for them Frogs. But will I pay $125 for a $50 bottle? I don't think so. Oregon makes a dang good pinot, come to think of it. The Anderson Valley of California is good at sparkling wine. I don't think the French can swallow the whole tariff, but they'll swallow as much as they can.
Stay tuned.
Hi Jim,
Thanks for the comment. Yes, I get tariffs are a tax (paid by U.S importers), but I think your comment suggests that they might not have much of an impact on prices due to the elasticity of certain goods. Is that right?
Correct. It will depend on the scope of the tariffs and any responses. The United States has been the consumer of last resort for a very long time, to the point where export-driven economies and their leaders don't even realize it anymore. Or take it for granted, figuring that our media will scare us into compliance.
Take Canada, for instance. About one-quarter of their economy depends on exports to the United States, while <5% of ours depends on exports to Canada. The Canadian economy rests mainly on resource extraction. They are kinda sorta the Beverly Hillbillies with an attitude. Time to call the Clampetts by their real name, I'd say.
True, the tariffs can put the hurt on some American car manufacturers for a while, but they'll get over it and move whatever is there to here. I think it's time to impress upon the citizens of Canada that we like them, but that whether they know it or not, their leaders are pirates with a smile and we're no longer going to put up with it. USD-CAD is now 1.43. Anyone for 2.50?
The EU is much more dependent on us than we are on them. They are masters at drafting communiques in elegant French (the language of diplomacy for its ambiguity) and then translating them into English, but the reality is that the U.S. pays 70% of NATO's bills and is shut out of many of their markets.
This is no longer 1948. Time for Europe to stand on its own two feet. Maybe that will impel Germany to reconsider its ongoing industrial suicide on the altar of anthropogenic global warming. Or maybe not. We shall see. There isn't much that the U.S. can't produce by ourselves.
I hear you. As I wrote in a comment above, it seems like it’s how you impose tariffs that matter. In the short term, it seems to do more damage than good, even from the data we have from Trump’s first term. Long term it seems more mixed, but even then I don’t know that it’s clear domestic production will increase substantially on all fronts. Plus, there’s always the political question of how much inflation we get, which is always deeply unpopular.
It seems like tariffs that are targeted make the most sense, especially from a national security standpoint in an increasingly dangerous world.
I think this video showed how the debate is more complicated than people think. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K0V8kZyl1T0&pp=ygUWRG8gdGFyaWZmcyB3b3JrIG9yIG5vdA%3D%3D
For the short-term and completely as long as their economic earning opportunities improve. Low prices are not the American dream.
Let’s see how it shakes out. I want more jobs and better wages for working class Americans. But economics are complex. We will find out soon enough.
I get text alerts for all the commitments of manufacturers for moving and building manufacturing in the US. There have been quite a few. It is a tide that is building.
There is already headwinds blowing against the economics for overseas manufacturing in that global wages have risen while US wages have stagnated, and ocean shipping costs are also higher. As the US pulls back from the Global Order, the cost of ocean freight insurance is skyrocketing. One sunk tanker or cargo ship in the Red Sea by Iran proxies is going to blow it up.
The threat of Trump tariffs is already having an accelerated impact on many pending decisions for a lot of companies. My wife just purchased a Genesis QV70. South Korean car manufactured in Alabama. We are going to see more and more of that. The Trump administration is pushing these businesses to locate in labor surplus areas. Rural areas. Promise Zones, etc.
And we already have out of control inflation without the tariffs, so there is a problem with corporate consolidation and a lack of competition that needs to be fixed. Tariffs take away the advantage of the massive multinationals that can locate their manufacturing overseas.
I understand the rationale, and I am sympathetic to some of protectionism (protecting certain industries, say, such as ones that affect national security). I think you can defend tariffs against China much more than you can against Canada and Mexico or the EU. Having strained relations with our allies isn’t wise, and I think Trump is mistaken to think a trade deficit means we are losing. Some countries make things and have access to resources that we don’t have and vice versa, and good trade agreements capitalize on that for all countries involved, you know?
The U.S. certainly has leverage, but I think the wiser course of action would be to renegotiate trade deals with these allies that are perhaps more favorable to us, especially to avoid reciprocal tariffs and a trade war, which will be costly.
Some of the data from tariffs in Trump’s first term are negative. Manufacturing ended up in the negative overall in relation to the tariffs, even after accounting for the slight increase in employment. In other words, the incentive to build more at home doesn’t always pan out, and if we get increased inflation on top of that, well, that’s no good.
But let’s see. I care about wages and good jobs for working class Americans, especially those really left behind. I just think there is a more responsible approach than the current one, and I think the uncertainty regarding business investment will be problematic too if Trump doesn’t stick with the policy.
Too many people seem to think that this is the 1950s or '60s, when the U.S. was the economic Colossus of Rhodes, responsible for 40% of the world's economic output. In fact, the U.S. is now responsible for only about 12% of world industrial production.
The idealists have welcomed a "multi-polar world" in their rhetoric, but not in their strategic thinking. Do any of these people, who include the Democratic AND Republican "thinkers" in Washington, D.C., who are prone to granting far too much weight to people whose reputations were inflated to begin with and who haven't had an original idea in decades, have pondered the implications?
Understand this: The share of world trade denominated in dollars has been nearly cut in half in the past decade, exacerbated by the foolish Biden administration's sanctions against Russia that only drove them toward the Chinese, India, and the Iranians. Biden's people didn't come out and say it, but they operated as if this was 1965, which it is not.
In a multi-polar world, the U.S. will not for long be able to trade surplus dollars for goods without paying an increasingly risky price. "Protectionism" is no longer a matter of importing cheap shirts from Bangladesh or taking in spiffy BMWs made in Germany, soon to be made in China. The tradeoffs are increasingly critical. The world has never operated on kumbaya and love, and it's time that BOTH parties understood it.
Donald Trump is crude and undisciplined in his rhetoric, but he's not wrong about the fundamentals. The time grows short.
I hear you on the change in the world economy. However, I think free trade insofar as it benefits us and others is still the ideal way to go. Still, the world is more dangerous now, and we have to be self sufficient in some ways, especially in national security. Plus, the workers who had jobs that were hollowed out in sectors like manufacturing with the promise they would have new jobs in the new world order, I think we owe to them protectionist policies to look out for them and prevent that from happening again. It seems to me some of those original ideas, like on free trade, still hold value, though.
Regarding Biden’s sanctions on Russia, I don’t think doing nothing to try to punish it for its invasion of Ukraine was an option. Yes, they did clever workarounds, and if they want to ally themselves with other dictator countries, particularly China, go for it. But all the more reason for us to ally with countries that champion democracy, and all the more reason to make sure our tariff policies are strategic, wise, and don’t lead to reciprocal tariffs and a trade war. That is not in our national interest, which is what worries me regarding what’s going on now with tariff policy against Canada, Mexico, and the EU.
Covid. I keep putting this in the comments. Covid changed everything for many people, and I was one of them. Before covid I had not realized how profoundly incompetent, dishonest and authoritarian our bureaucracy and our government can be. . I was sick with covid early on, and I am 63. It was a bad flu. Many of my friends got it too. We all realized the sinister insanity of what was going on. We saw the Great Barrington Declaration slandered and then ignored. It changed us forever. Red pilled.
We don't want a world where experts whose whole life is looking for epidemics, and who have massive conflicts of interest, can turn human civilization upside down. And then mandate new untested mrna shots. Never again.
Mixed feelings here. Mostly negative toward Fauci Inc., which covered up the Wuhan origins. It's telling that Biden pardoned him.
In my rural county, the first "covid victim" was a guy who fell off his roof and broke his neck. His blood tested positive, and I have no doubt that the hospital scarfed up the bounty. A neighbor spent 10 days in the hospital with myocarditis from the vaxx, life-flighted to Seattle. A friend's wife in Massachusetts had serious complications from the vaxx. Another friend in North Dakota was barred from visiting his father in a nursing home until he dared them to call the police. They didn't.
On the other side of it, one of my spouse's cousins refused the vaxx, and died of covid at the age of 60, with no contributing factors that I know of. I was vaxxed and boostered once, and got it (as did my spouse) after the booster, and again last fall. Mild cases.
The masks never protected the wearers. Big increases in respiratory problems among retail workers who had to wear them all day. The media never mentioned any of it. They censored the truth about HCQ and Ivermectin, and so did Twitter and Facebook. The social media organizations were abject failures, and worse. Facebook, in particular, is still politically censored. Nothing in the media about vaxx reactions or much higher rates of premature death among the vaxxed. Kids were vaxxed even though hardly any kids get covid, and the death rate is vanishingly small.
Covid did a real number on our rural schools. They still haven't fully recovered from what that did to student discipline. Remote learning was a joke. Anyone recall Obama's "rural broadband initiative" and Biden's renewal of the same with much more money? Um, that's another story, so the short one is that it was and remains a complete fraud. If that whole thing comes up in the comments maybe I will tell that story.
Well said.
For starters, I think the Democrats have it wrong on climate change. Trump, in his ham-fisted way, has called it a hoax. He's somewhat correct, if we understand climate change to mean the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, i.e., the idea that carbon dioxide emissions from human activity have caused the earth's temperatures to rise.
This just isn't the case. A year and a half ago, Statistics Norway definitively debunked that idea. Naturally, their analysis got no media attention. The warming since the end of the Little Ice age is within the range of natural variability.
https://www.ssb.no/en/natur-og-miljo/forurensning-og-klima/artikler/to-what-extent-are-temperature-levels-changing-due-to-greenhouse-gas-emissions
Progressives love to ignore, disparage, and smear heterodoxy, all while preaching nuance and critical thinking. Until someone practices it, at which point they become Nazis, idiots, trailer trash, racists, and dupes. We are told that the AGW hypothesis is "settled science," when in fact science is never truly settled. Still, the Dems have pushed some extremely expensive and unreliable alternatives, solar and wind being the biggies, the result being an increasingly fragile power grid and skyrocketing utility rates.
There is much more to say about this, but I'll close this comment by saying that Democrats have positioned themselves directly against the standard of living. Not the way to win, that's for sure.
I have read some of the stuff from actual climate scientists like the UN agency. They are much less hysterical than climate journalists.
If you get time, that link to the Statistics Norway paper is in English and it is by far the single most definitive thing I have ever read about the subject. Human-caused climate change is, to me, almost entirely a secular religion.
Man, Ruy, you have my utmost respect. You are willing, as so few are, to actually get into the serious problems of the Democrat Party. As a historian, I very much see similarities to the Whigs---unable or unwilling to address the key issue of the day (illegal immigration), while offering no countervailing issues that might peel away voters. And I don't know what those issues would be. But there are these major civil wars going on inside the Dem Party that haven't even been addressed, and must be for the party to survive---and I'm not talking thrive or win elections, but avoid being the next "Know-Nothings" or "Liberty Party:"
1) The ongoing illegal alien/inner city resident civil war. People such as Noah Smith and some on your blog have identified this as a "good management" problem. NO. It's a fundamental disconnect with the voters about who is an American. Until Democrats get this right, they will continue to see the flight from cities/blue states and erosion of black/hispanic support from cities as their LEGAL benefits are redirected to alien invaders. And that must be the language, I'm sorry to say. IF Democrats continue to portray them as just "job seekers," there is no hope.
2) The ongoing civil war between the Hamas/Palestinian wing of the Democrat Party and the Israel/Jewish wing. The sad truth is short of actual violence against Jews, there is nothing the Party can do to drive Jewish voters from the Party. However, the very bad news is that millions of Christians identify with Israel as the birthplace of their religion and an area given to the Jews. THOSE are the ones you will lose. People such as Omar and Tlaib are NOT viewed as "diverse" but as virtual terrorists who hate America, and this is a huge, huge problem for the Democrats.
3) The latest one, which even you don't realize or discuss, is AI vs. Green. The whole green transition is deader than the Avengers series. But AI is the new kid on the block, is embraced by EVERYONE, and . . . sucks energy like nothing ever before. There is no scenario on earth in which green and AI coexist. It is drill, baby, drill. And the techhies are slowly moving to the GOP because that is the only place they will find energy.
4) There is actually a new civil war brewing, again, ignored. The DOGE revelations show how utterly corrupt the NGOS (which are overwhelmingly Democrat) are and how much money not only is wasted but is criminally directed against the USA. This will be the toughtest one to overcome. Think of the rump Democrats who stayed with the Union in 1862. It would take a group like that, surviving about 10 years while steadily moving to real-world solutions---not woke, green, ESG, DEI kinds of stuff---to survive. I suggest a Democrat Hill group that actually URGES cutting gubment, firing the members of the Deep State, and even prosecuting people like John Brennan and James Comey. You'd be shocked at how fast people would come to your side.
Oh, and the economy won't save you. Inflation dropped by 50%, mfg and industrial production surged by DOUBLE what was expected, and before it's done, DOGE is gonna slash the debt itself.
Spoken as a historian.
...Look Larry, the effort is always welcome, but to an impartial observer there are a host of reasons to doubt your capacity as a historian, no offense. This goes back to your claim to expertise on the subject of Chinese history, of which you have subsequently demonstrated little grasp of, whether it be ancient or modern.
Then you do things like claim that the primary concern of the tech titans when it comes to AI is energy production...which is a pretty clear indicator that you don't really understand how AI works or what powers it. Which in turn makes it fairly dubious you understand the underlying dynamics of the AI race. Which, again, makes the depth of your historical understanding likewise dubious.
True historical understanding comes from trying to comprehend the holistic whole of the historical data about a time period...not assembling a selection of historical facts around a predefined narrative. And at the moment, you seem to be engaged in the latter, not the former.
in other words I'm dead on
...spoken ahistorically, as is the trend.
I think he was discussing the connection between AI and energy consumption, not production.
He was saying that the tech titans are somehow changing their allegiances out of concern about energy consumption, when that is a distant secondary concern of theirs, compared to other issues, which are their primary motivating factor--something that is obvious to anyone who understands how AI works and how the tech titans get their massive neural nets to function optimally.
The disconnect is that politics is ultimately a sales business, and the Democrats' pitch is "buy my product or else you are a bad person."
BINGO! Hell of sales pitch, isn't it? And this is a party controlled by progressives who show every sign of thinking that they are smarter than everyone else. You know what? I want them to tell us where they get their mushrooms, so I can hear in colors too.
I think there are two basic skillsets: abstract and social. Progressives are abstract thinkers, and they don't think about sales. If anything, they view "sales" as an educational opportunity. Which has become highly annoying.
I am a fan of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, which is rooted in Jungian psychology. The MBTI is controversial; some think of it as voodoo with no more validity than a horoscope, but I don't dismiss it because when I took the test 40 years ago without knowing anything about it and got the results ("INTJ"), I thought wow, it's as if someone has been following me around with a clipboard.
Now, after much more experience in life, one thing I realize is that anything is just a slant, or a construct, and that no "answers" are definitive. They are only attempts at understanding, and should be seen that way: as attempts. Even if I don't agree, or even if I do agree, no one gets it "right" or "wrong," but they should be seen as "serious" or maybe "foolish," but the serious ones should be taken seriously even if I end up rejecting them, an example of the latter being Modern Portfolio Theory.
(I am going over the woods and through the hills here, but I promise to get to grandma's house, and hope it will be worth it.)
MPT was invented by a Nobel Prizewinner or maybe two of them in the 1950s, and purports to construct an optimally efficient mix of stocks that eliminates risk. In business school, I dismissed it and still do because it rests on "beta," which looks at a stock's past performance relative to the market, and allows the believer to arrive at a diversified portfolio whose individual fluctuations will offset each other and eliminate risk.
The problem, as I saw it, was that beta looks backward, and implicitly assumes that the future will replicate the past. I raised my hand and challenged the professor on it, and he replied that, right or wrong, MPT and its companion, the Efficient Market Hypothesis which holds that a stock's price incorporates all information, is nevertheless worthy of close study because they are serious.
It took me time to see that he was correct. You should study serious ideas for their insights, even if flawed. The same goes for the MBTI and its extension, the Enneagram, which essentially put human beings into 16 personality types, a mixture of introversion/extraversion, intuitive/literal "sensing," thinking/feeling, and scheduled/spontaneous.
Now grandma's house: I can't agree with a generality about how progressives think. We all put people into categories. It's a human trait based on pattern recognition, which I think is fundamental to intelligence and not just human. As with any fundamental trait, pattern recognition has positive and negative aspects. It's necessary for survival, but it can lead anyone seriously astray too.
So, as much as we depend on pattern recognition, we have to be aware of its limitations. This is true of many of our traits, both universal and individual. For instance, I am a born arithmetic wiz. I love numbers and statistics, but I am aware of their limitations, one being that quantification, as powerful as it is, can't measure everything so I remind myself to try to remember that there are equally powerful realities that cannot be quantified: love, hate, fear, hunger, emotional attraction and repulsion among other things.
We live in a scientific, mechanical, engineering society, and one consequence is specialization, which underlies economics. Yet, without the generalists, we're lost. I routinely lampoon the generalistic liberal arts graduates of Eastern finishing schools, and with (in my opinion) good reason. The progressives are too heavily tilted in that direction. Too many of them are political scientists, and not nearly as skilled as they think they are. The bowels of the Democratic Party, and many of its rank and file, are filled with bulls--- poly sci students. Ugh.
As a group, I think they tend to be too heavily emotional, and this INTJ (a type sometimes called "the analyst") laments the exclusion of hard-headed, pragmatic, cold-heated analysis. Progressives are susceptible to fads in my view, and fail when they don't apply rigorous tests, in essence the scientific method, to their conclusions. Yet, a world full of INTJs would be a scary one, which is why the dawn of artificial intelligence, aka artificial stupidity, worries me.
In reality, I think the 16 types are distributed throughout society, with conservatives tending more toward the hard-headed but certainly not exclusively so. Therefore, in grandma's living room, they're all present. Maybe it would help if people would do more to recognize the limitations of their inclinations and of the mental tools they hold dear, including pattern recognition without which we'd all be dead.
Damn, this was a long comment. LOL
p.s.: Modern Portfolio Theory led to "portfolio insurance," and was commercialized in the 1990s. It failed spectacularly in 1998, when it led to the Asian financial crisis that year.
p.p.s.: The Bible, being a compilation, is by definition a mixed bag, which is an eternal strength and a major weakness. I am a huge fan of Ecclesiastes, especially 1:9 (nothing new under the sun) and Chapter 3 (a season for everything, or as the Byrds sang it, "Turn, Turn Turn.")
This is the season for hard realities, the season of "no." So was the 1940s; was there ever a more vivid "no" than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the subesquent American threat to annihilate the rest of Japan if they didn't surrender? Other times, the 1930s and the 1950s being examples, were seasons of "yes." The Great Society of the '60s was a "yes" taken too far, and the moon landing of 1969 was the greatest "yes" ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVOJla2vYx8
Re MPT, 99.999% of the time "alpha" is just leveraged beta.
And everything correlates when the shit hits the fan.
Michael Shellenberger's article about Marc Andreeson's experience with the Biden Admin and AI is interesting. It demonstrates why Big Tech embraced Trump. The Progressive need for control loomed large. Good read.
Exactly. MPT and the companion EMH promise something they cannot deliver, the automatic hedging of risk through non-correlation, which rests on beta, which is a way of straight-lining the past into the future. Then comes the Black Swan. Just when you think it'll all be Candygrams, the Land Shark rings the doorbell. In the end, some things cannot be automated. This to me, is also the potential Achilles Heel of "artificial intelligence."
I saw the interview (or article about?) Andreeson. Excellent stuff.
You'll get a kick out of this. I met the Dean from my B0-school in the early 2000s, and started to ask him about the EMH, and he said " do you mean does anyone believe it anymore?"
Americans have long been suspicious of the Democratic Party's mindless accommodations for of divisive, stupid even dangerous Leftist idealogy like gender identification and transformation or lawfare weaponization of the judiciary. The most charitable interpretation of Democratic intent is that the Party has placed winning elections above any and all other considerations or obstacles, including real science and the U.S. Constitution.
Now, its silence, even cheering, in the face of domestic terrorists torching Tesla electronic vehicles and vandalizing dealerships, the party is showing its openness to stopping Elon Musk and, its real target, Donald Trump, by any means necessary, including notably lawlessness and violence.
There may be no rehabilitating nor rebuilding of a Democratic Party wholly owned by fringe radical Marxists.
Get theeself to truth social suh
Donald??
In an interview with NBC News' "Meet the Press," Sen. Bernie Sanders said "Vice President Kamala Harris' changing views are part of "doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election."
How do the democrats get past that truth? You can voice changes all you want, but if people don't believe you are sincere, then it does no good. With potential candidates like slick Newsome and wacko Walz out there every day acting like a clown, the Democrats chance of turning everything around is slim to none.
Revelations every day of the corruption and duplicity of the biden administration will keep the Dems down for a long time. Unless a way is found to sever biden from the party. Whether or not the revelations of biden's deceit and misappropriations of funds are true or false doesn't matter any more. The Dems are to the point where it is assumed the worse rather than best.
Trump hasn't been in office in 100 days. The Dem party bamboozled it's identity group voters for 60 years. Now they have wised up and left the party. How do you get them back? As an Independent that voted for Trump, if I were asked today if I thought the economy was going in the right direction could just as easily say no as yes. But that question is a Red Herring. If I were asked if the economy was going to get better, I'd say you bet it is. The last point is, polls maybe indicate the "what" but they don't delve very deep into "why". They leave that up to pundits who are mostly the same pundits before the election. Some have adapted well, the Liberal Patriot is one of them. Late night shows, MSNBC, CNN, NBC or the rest of the major media do not help help your cause. They need to change or be cut off, turned off. The comments from the left in our local newspapers indicate the lower rank and file have no interest in finding good candidates or more people orientated policies. Just insults cut and pasted from before the election.
But to me the biggest obstacle for the Dems is the solid belief, that Bernie was right. And you will never overcome that stigma while the CAs, NYs, COs and Chicagos/IL continue on their current path. Pritzkter is a loser. He should neutered ASAP. He doesn't understand the basic new truth that bases don't win elections. Something as simple as they will assist ICE with illegal criminals could be a great start as a game changer. The Dems would be seen as changing such unpopular positions and really mean it. As it stands, every time I see big blue cities in the news what I think are Curt Russell's escape movies. We should just put barriers around sanctuary cities and leave them to their own destruction.
you just wrote what I was about to say... Harris claiming to move to the middle, well no one, or very few, believed that one. If she would have been elected, she would have gone as far left, as quickly as she could.
I've voted independent for the past several elections & was going to again this time. But on the day I was going to go vote early, I read on another site, a guy who posts very biased stuff, a link to Axios saying nearly half of Trump voters may have to resort to violence if Trump should lose. I followed the link.
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/21/republicans-trump-declare-election-invalid
That made me so angry. I posted he should revise that & say OVER half of Republicans do NOT think they should resort to violence. Bill, the owner of the site, refused to budge. I left the house, intending to vote independent, but voted for Trump. Bill said he likes to think he influences his readers, but never in that way. Hmmm, so lefties, perhaps watch what ya say/write??? Don't exaggerate/embellish/incite hatred/look down on us dummies...
Before that day, I had been confronted by people on numerous times when I refused to say who I was going to vote for. They automatically assumed I was going to vote for Trump & they very directly told me I HAD to vote for Harris or I was voting for Hitler.
Oh, & the identity voters have caught on, perhaps. Not all Republicans hate people of color, or gays, etc. My motto for YEARS has been: there's nothing worse than a conservative bigot, unless it's a liberal hypocrite
It is still the economy, stupid! Stocks have plunged. So has consumer and business confidence. Forecasters expect slower growth, higher unemployment and faster inflation. Trumpanomics is rapidly digging its own hole.
I have never liked Trump's citations of the stock market, and I like the Democrats' citations even less. To me, the latter illustrates the degree to which the Democrats have divorced themselves from the working middle class that they once represented but no longer do. On Main Street, people do not spend the S&P 500. They spend what is in their wallet, fer chrissakes.
Of course, the people who run the Democratic Party don't have household budgets. Rich people don't pay attention to the little stuff. They don't have to decide whether to pay the electric bill or the car insurance, and watch grocery prices not for politics but for what they can afford this week. They watch the stock market, and pretend about the rest, like Walz pretended to be a bird hunter but didn't even know how to hold a shotgun.
Kids, it's about jobs and income. Democrats lost last year mainly because unemployment rose during the crucial second quarter of a presidential election year. There is a very solid relationship between the direction of the 2Q unemployment rate and the November results. Only once since World War II has an incumbent party's presidential candidate won if unemployment rose during the spring of an election year. Inflation sure didn't help.
Until just lately, progressives were joyous at the rising price of eggs, or so it sure looked. Aha! Gotcha! You ruined breakfast, evil Nazi Republicans. Oops, guess what? On March 3, the wholesale price was $8.17 a dozen. Yesterday, it was $3.03. In only a bit more than two weeks, egg prices at wholesale are down 63%. The reason: Bird flu is abating. Retail prices will be coming down soon. Progressives will be disappointed. Trump will claim credit.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eggs-us
So what now? Agitate for the rights of Venezuelan gangsters. Revel in the firebombing of Tesla dealers. Argue for the advocates of Hamas on campuses. As someone who voted Democrat in the first 10 presidential elections of my voting history and who went write-in for the last three, I ask progressives the same thing I asked Republicans 15 years ago: What in hell are you FOR?
The Democratic message needs to be jobs, jobs, jobs and law and order. Politics is downstream of the economy.
A big problem (of many) with the Democrats is their widespread belief, not just among their ruling progressives but here too, is that they can fix this with "messaging."
Uh-uh. Not hardly. Democratic Party "messaging" of the past was forged in the crucible of the New Deal and ratified by the sweeping victory of World War II, augmented by the Great Society. Still true now; when all else fails scare 'em about Social Security.
Democrats can make proposals, but the fiscal realities preclude anything sweeping. As for the "messaging," the progressive stranglehold precludes anything meaningful there. See what happens to any major Democrat who says something like, "You know what? I don't think biology has changed since I learned in seventh grade that we are mammals, and that mammals come in two sexes."
Messaging? Yeah, right.
You're conflating 'messaging' with 'signaling support for policies XYZ'.
But the thing is, it doesn't matter if you support the most popular policies in American history if you can't get the message out. Case in point, the CHIPs act accomplished more for the working class in terms of re-shoring manufacturing than anything Trump has ever done--but the working class never heard about it.
Why? Because the Democrats' messaging strategies are not optimized for the current informational environment, and the realities of the attention economy. They are still campaigning like its 2008--but the media landscape is completely different than 2008. Right now the Republicans have the edge here.
But it will not last forever. When the party's messaging apparatus adjusts, it will be well-placed to lead an anti-MAGA backlash. (there is always a backlash--never forget your dialectics) Especially once Trump does them the favor (and the country the disservice) of losing Cold War 2.0.
Why do you think the GOP brass is constantly saying "keep your eye on AOC"? It's not because of her policies, many of which aren't super popular. It's because they know it's not *really* about policy--and because they know she understands the current media environment, and how to message in it.
True, you should never hide the light under a bushel. But you (not you personally, but a political party) should not let the tail wag the dog either. First comes the work, then comes the "messaging."
What I see from the Democrats is back-asswards on that. They show every sign of thinking that all they need to do is come up with new wording. Uh-uh, no way.
CHIPs Act was a good thing but the delivery on it was pretty anemic.
Build, baby, build.
The price of eggs in NV is about half that in CO. Both Kroger owned stores. NV just suspended its requirement for cage free hens. Connection?
"Cage free" is a joke. The overwhelming majority of eggs come from indoor egg factories. Anyone who thinks that "cage free" chickens don't still live in cages deserves to be laughed at.
Out here in the countryside -- the America that the movers and shakers in the Democratic Party are scared of and angry about because they cannot control it -- there are actually pasture chickens. They don't "free range" as much as the geniuses think they do. Why? Because the coyotes will break their little necks and eat them, and then the eggs. Egg-suckin' dogs!
Shoot coyotes like my neighbor (who lives with his wife in a double-wide and voted for Sanders in the '16 primary and Trump in the general) does with his 7mm rifle at 300 yards with only iron sights? What's that? Guns? Ban them! Poor coyotes!
Our eggs cost us $5/dozen. The egg lady down the road drops them off personally at our house, and we love her. She has not changed her prices. Anyone want to guess what happens in spring? I'll tell you: The more light, the more eggs. The egg lady's chickens are laying like crazy, and she's donating a lot of them to the food bank. Who knew? Not the Democrats.
Weekly egg production nationally is now 5% higher than it was at this time a year ago. Bird flu is subsiding, at least in those egg factories. Demand is down 12% because there is price elasticity. Democrats, as a group, either didn't take Econ 101 or got gentleperson's Cs, and don't have a clue.
Boy oh boy are they going to be peeved when retail egg prices start crashing at the grocery store.
In 100 days? A lot of that is correcting the mess biden left. And a mess that big can not be corrected in a short amount of time.
Dan - I recommend you buy a used Tesla from a liberal neighbor who may have bought it as a status symbol. It is a great car. Your neighbor can then buy another EV brand.
I live in America and I'm afraid to drive a car because of left wing lunatics. This violence is supported by the likes of Tim Walz, who is prancing around chortling about destroying an American company with American workers. Late night t.v. audience whooped and hollered and cheered about fire-bombed Tesla dealership. Vote Dem? No way.
Even though retired with not to far to go most the time, I’ll drive an EV after the government gives me one. That was my greatest disappointment of joe. Barack gave out phones, Joe should have given out EVs.
The short story on that one is that EVs are viable urban commuter cars today. In a decade or so (watch me be wrong on the timing), they will be viable anywhere vehicles. By 2040 or so, I doubt that you'll even be able to buy a new ICEV. They will go the way of oil lamps, propjets for anything but short-range commercial air travel, and incandescent light bulbs for anything other than specialized uses.
This is not a political statement, or any kind of EVangelism at all. This is pure engineering. Today's batteries use a liquid electrolyte. Once the solid-state batteries come online and then ride down the manufacturing scale economy cost curve, driving ranges will triple or more, and the other downsides of EVs will be history.
This is purely engineering to me, always has been, and always will be.
I talked to a representative from a solar panel company for solar for my house. I like the idea. With all the rebates etc it was affordable. Problem is, at my age, a 20 to 30 year stretch to recoup my investment was not practical. Nor was it all the practical. I drive used Toyotas. Made in America. Semi expensive to buy and fix but if you don't have to fix them often then it becomes a good deal. I also have a lot electrical toys etc. Not to many need to fixed becasue it is cheaper just to buy a new one. I hear the same applies to EVs. And I don't forget that one has to add an expensive charging system to ones home adding more things that could need to be fixed, and living in Nebraska, cold weather is bad for EVs so it adds to the cost and lack of reliability. One thing the biden administration was not good at, or maybe they never tried, was trying to predict the consequences of their actions. Their plan for EVs was never practical or realistic. Such as, who was going to buy all the citizens who couldn't afford the EVs. Buy used ones? The lack of battery life past about 10 years becomes to expensive to make them practical for the poor and middle class.
Whether or not I could afford one is irrelevant. It is whether or not I chose to waste my money on one. I have a good friend who owned one. It was stolen and by the time she got it back it was going to, cost $17,000 to fix and an ungodly amount of time before it could be fix. She sold hers, bought a gas car, and said good riddance. Your argument is neither here nor there for me. It has no relevance to my life like most ordinary Americans. Especially if the Dem party, controlled by elites and the rich, are trying to cram them down our throats.
"Expensive charging stations" make me laugh. Hard. They remind me of the car salesman in the Fargo movie selling clear coat treatment. Sure, if you're a sucker you can get one. Or you can have someone wire up a 240-volt outlet. Or you can stick a splitter on the outlet for your electric dryer and run an extension cord.
A level 2 (i.e. 240v, 32A) EV charging cord goes for $100 on Amazon. A 50-foot 240v, 32A extension cord goes for $68. A splitter goes for $40. Voila! $208 total. Feel free to spend more if money is burning a hole in your pocket. There are only two reasons why people get those charging stations. One is that sometimes the car company will throw one in for free, at which point you have to spend a bunch of money to have it installed. The other is that all of this is new, and people are sitting ducks for every shyster.
Solar panel economics are a function of your electric rates and your latitude. When I looked into them eight years ago, the net price for the juice after the tax credits was about 14 cents/kWh not including installation. Electricity is cheap where we live, and it didn't pencil out. That's the simple story. There are more factors.
As for used EVs, the key there is to ascertain the condition of the battery. There is a reliable way to do that, but I wonder how many people go that far. Once solid state batteries replace liquid electrolytes (I think 2035 for solid state battery prices to be viable in the mass market, but maybe it'll be sooner), I think the current generation of EVs will be about as valuable as a used "blazing fast" Gateway 386 desktop computer with a "gigantic" 100 MB hard drive. LOL
Funny that Tesla came up. I have a long personal history with EVs. I have never been a Musk worshipper when the progressives passed up no opportunity to shine his knob. Today, I chuckle at the wingnuts who are doing the same, and growl at the progressives who condemn him and cheer the vandalism because Musk committed wrongthink.
Today, I had to drive to Portland for a few errands. 170-mile roundtrip. There's a Tesla showroom along one of the freeway routes, so I got off and went over there. Walked in and said to the gay kid at the counter who was acting as a greeter that I was there to offer support. The place and an outbuilding had boarded-up windows from where shots had been fired in the middle of the night.
I told him that my support had nothing to do with Musk, or "DOGE," or Trump, but I was there because I don't think anyone has any god damned business fucking with him or anyone else there (the place is also a service center) who's doing nothing but working for a living.
On my way out, I added that I don't even really like Teslas, that I had driven one and it was fun, but I wouldn't be a customer. But still, I said, you are working for a living and no one should ever mess with that for any reason.
The goddamned progressives are so arrogant! These are the people who lecture everyone about workers? The hell! There's more to say about EVs, which are one of my three dozen or so "islands of competence" that people develop as they get older, but this comment is already long.
The Dem neighbor would buy a Chinese EV over a Tesla. That's where the Democrat party is today.
I was wondering what percentage of actual American EV production that Tesla represents.
Study: Tesla Makes the Most ‘American’ Cars, Kelly Blue Book.
Cox Automotive released its Q4 and 2024 EV sales report last week, showing estimates of how many EVs were sold by brand and model, and highlighting how many units Tesla is delivering compared to other automakers for another year in a row. Total EV sales in the U.S. grew 7.3 percent year over year, amounting to a little over 1.3 million units—of which Tesla sold 633,762, or 48.7 percent.
Tesla’s total sales amounted to more than double those of the rest of the top 10 EVs sold in 2024, a list which was comprised of vehicles from General Motors (GM), Hyundai, Ford, and Rivian.
https://www.teslarati.com/how-many-evs-sold-us-2024-model/
Biden hated Elon so much he tipped the scales for Rivian. Tesla got zero subsidies, Rivian received a $6.6B "loan."
"Rivian has received a conditional commitment for a $6.6 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) program to support the construction of its electric vehicle factory in Georgia."
Then why did Trump promise to fix it all on day one?
To get elected. All such promises by those running for election should be evaluated for what they say. Did I expect him to do his one day promises on day one! Most of them no. Would he get them done sooner rather than later. Yep.
If we are to evaluate promises for what they say, and his promises are simply bombastic lies, by what logic would these lies support the expectation that he will keep any of his promises at all?
When a used car salesman tells you the engine in a car he wants you to buy is "good as new", and you know he's lying, do you then think to yourself "it's definitely not new, but it's probably close to pretty new"?
Because his principles are to fulfills his promises. Hope. I look at it and evaluate for myself. If you take the word of a salesman you don't trust, the smart move is not deal with them.
Compare to the promises to find the soul of the nation and unite the nation. Obviously neither is with in reach of anyone ever. His principles as he applies them to souls and uniting are not the principles I can agree with or believe he has any tools to do so.
Its always about intuition and critical thinking. Not critical feelings.
How does one handle the wedding promises?
Because he is God's own blowhard. That's the downside. The upside is that everyone knows it, so they don't hold him to the outrageous promises. It was said in 2016 -- true then, true now -- that his opponents take him literally but not seriously, while his supporters take him seriously but not literally.
In '16, I wrote in Vermin Supreme because at least he admitted that he was a clown. In '20, I wrote in Kanye West because he made no bones about being crazy. In '24, I wrote in Kanye again and added P. Diddy for VP, because both major party candidates were just as insulting. Anyone who thought Trump would end inflation on Day 1 is exactly who P.T. Barnum was talking about when he remarked that a sucker is born every minute.
By the way, eggs were $4.50 a dozen at Costco today. The wholesale price is down by 63% since March 1st, and I think the next Costco run in a few months will see eggs at $3. The Democrats are going to have to find something else to whine about.
The economy is definitely a problem for Republicans. It will recover by 2028 but maybe not by 2026. Remember 1981 and how painful that was and how great 1982 was for the Democrats. The thing you are missing among all the cultural issues is that the Democrats have become the war party. That doesn't often move the needle on elections but sometimes it does. If Trump settles a couple of wars and doesn't start any new ones that is going to be a problem for Democrats. And the Democrats need to ditch the Europeans. Trump and JD are right about that. They are war mongering parasites who don't share our democratic values.
Thus far, there's no actual evidence that there's anything wrong with the economy. Trump's tariff dance has the media nervous, and they are making the public nervous. We shall see.
The Democrats that can win normie voters are the Democrats the party doesn't like. If winning was the only priority, they'd lean on Fetterman and G-Perez. They could have probably gone with the new Gavin Newsome but he governed California badly with his high taxes on productive citizens. I think people would worry he talks a good game but doesn't moderate when in power. I think they have to choose. 1. Keep their "morality" as defined by some definition of good that doesn't align with voters. 2. Moderate on culture while finding a plan that speaks to broad economic plans for everyone making more than $30,000 and less than $250,000 per year. (The other groups have had more than their share of attention)
Less international citizens and more American citizens, not necessarily American first but definitely not America last. And, for goodness sakes, stop creating enemies with every single group of people who isn't classified as "oppressed"
I should add that today the D party favorables dropped from 29% to 27%.
The Democratic Party will blame the "deplorables." Kids, please trust a dweller in a country "swing" county: That one will ring through the ages.
This was a brilliant assessment, but Dems would do themselves a big favor, if they lost the terms "educated " and "uneducated" when referring to voters. When it is 100 degrees outside, and your AC dies, you want a repairperson educated in air conditioning, far more than a Gender Studies grad.
Pre Biden, I find it hard it hard to remember anyone referring to 2/3rds of the US as, "uneducated", but Dems have become very comfortable with the term, the last 4 years. That is somewhat amusing, because while life without semiconductor chips would be hard, life without food, would be impossible.
Dems have a hard time drawing lines. They believe, because the US should not deport, an otherwise law abiding, undocumented 50 year old female maid, we should also never deport male gang members, who rape and murder young girls, before the victims are old enough to visit the feminine hygiene aisle of CVS.
Likewise Dems believe there should be no bail, because the policy discriminates against the poor. So bail reform has allowed violent, accused criminals to wander the streets, pretrial. Where theirmost likely next victims are, almost always, poor, minorities.
And it appears, things may get worse for Dems, before the improve. Much of the so called Dem "woke" problem, is really a hypocrisy problem. Every Dem Senator voted against legislation that would have required public school bathrooms, locker rooms and athletic fields, remain exclusively females spaces. No one mentioned, it is easier to find a live unicorn, than a Dem Senator, with a kid in public school.
Climate Change reeks of the same hypocrisy. A private jet to Davos, says nearly everything that needs to be said, on the subject. Mark Kelly replacing his Tesla with a Tahoe , because he suddenly hates Elon Musk, as Elon rescues stranded US astronauts, says the rest.
Even many "educated" Dems fail to appreciate ,that last time a US Dem President, failed on the level of Biden. Reagan replaced Carter, and Dems wandered the political wilderness for 12 long years, that could have easily been 16. Surely some Dems. recall the failure
The economy is not the stock market, for many people, maybe most people, the economy is the amount they earn versus what they pay out. The job that allows people to earn a wage is immeasurably important to that person.
Support for Trump's handling of the economy is tanking, but most of the people who were on the fence about voting for Trump would still vote the same given a second chance.
Is it tanking? Groceries and gas are coming down in our area, rather noticeably. Brent oil is off nearly $15 bucks a barrel. West Texas is down more than $10 barrel. Nearly everything an American eats, drives, wears, or purchases during the course of a day, is connected to oil.
It has only been 60 days. Should oil settle in the sweet spot for consumers, the lowest cost that allows companies to continue, but not bust, inflation will fall demonstrably .
The argument from all that oppose Trump's moves to lower government waste, fraud and abuse and to Make America Work Again seem to be...
EVERYTHING IS FINE THE WAY IT IS! JUST LEAVE IT ALONE!
Just consider that and ask yourself just how tone-deaf these people must be following the last election.
As much as the usual red meat satisfies the tummies of the alt-right wing of your audience, Ruy, you're not looking beyond the short-run view of the polling, and you're completely leaving out of the dynamics of foreign policy...so you're underestimating the degree to which Trump is currently in the process of sabotaging his party. It's George W. Bush level self-immolation, bumped up several degrees--and we all remember how things looked at the end of Dubya's presidency.
Every American alive right now has grown up with the U.S.'s status as The Great Power as a fundamentally assumed birthright. Built into their psyche since 1945 is the assumption that the U.S. can determine its own fate in the world, and consequently built into their psyche is also a complete intolerance for becoming a 'lesser power' than other countries. That, to them, means they are 'losers'. And they cannot stand looking like 'losers'. At all.
Trump is single-handedly dismantling the basis of the U.S.'s Great Power status. And when Americans have to sit back and watch as the U.S. is helpless to stop the break-up of the dollar zone and the Chinese acquisition of Taiwan...when they are forced to confront the degree to which they have been played by Putin--who has no interest in cooperation with the West--and are now the subordinates of a unified Sino-Russian axis...and when their country has no allies in either hemisphere that trust it enough to cooperate with it...They are going to revile the architect of it all at a scale far worse than their revulsion for Dubya.
The Reagan coalition and the New Deal Democrat coalition was built on the foundations of winning the Second Great War and winning the Cold War. Never will a coalition be built in America on a party, or a leader, that lost the second Cold War.
I recommend listening to the Ezra Klein interview. A very tiny portion of the American electorate cares about foreign policy. Most voters don't even keep up with it and couldn't answer 5 basic questions. They care about what they actually see and experience in daily life. That's it. How do I feel? Is my life good? Is it better now or was it better then? Do I trust these people? I don't know why you think the audience is alt-right. Most of us are old school Democrats who were pushed out or pushed too far. We haven't given up all hope for reform but we probably should.
Not all of the audience is alt-right--and I'm talking about the readership, here, not the authors, who are all mostly center-left--but if you follow the stories on this site, when the authors express left or center-left views, it is greeted with hostility and skepticism in the comments, and does not receive nearly as much attention as when the right is praised, or painted favorably vs the left or center-left. Even when Ruy's inner social democrat peeks out from underneath the Democratic scoldings, nigh every comment is "Great article Ruy, but you're dead wrong on [insert Ruy's social democratic view]."
And no, most voters don't keep up with the *nuances* of foreign policy, but they have always been very attuned to *major foreign policy failures*, and moments when the U.S. 'lost' some global military or economic battle that embarrassed it on the world stage. Most recently, they were angered by what they perceived to be a chaotic pullout of Afghanistan that made the country 'look bad'; they were likewise angered about the failure of the Iraq campaign; Trump provoked rage about the economic rise of China; widespread discontent grew out of Carter's failure to resolve the Iran hostage crisis; they were scandalized by Sputnik--the list goes on.
If you think they won't be similarly stirred to discontent by witnessing a failure to stop the ascendancy of a Eurasian bloc with more power than the U.S., a failure to prevent China from taking Taiwan when it wants, a fall from Great Power status, and--most importantly--the effects of the dollar losing reserve currency status, you'd have to explain away their negative reactions to every other instance of massive foreign policy failure.
You seem to think that we have a choice about this. The Pax Americana is done for. We’re not strong enough to enforce it anymore. Trump seems to be the only person in government who understands this.
There is still a difference between imperfectly upholding the stature of a Great Power whose hegemony is in secular decline and governing in a way that actively sabotages that hegemony and destroys that stature.
That's why Britons still love Churchill, but despise Anthony Eden. And it's why Russians still view Brezhnev favorably, and despise Gorbachev.
And Trump is working very hard on becoming the American Gorbachev right now. Eurasians are appreciative of his dismantling of the West; once the dust settles, Americans will not be. Like I said , they cannot stand looking like "losers"...and losers of Cold War 2.0 they shall likely be, by the time 2028 rolls around.
I would add that Trump’s macho posturing, while irritating, show that he does understand about the loser thing. Determination to fight for our position as a nation, and inspiring the effort and solidarity to do that, is not going to read like “losing” to most Americans.
I guess I see this “imperfect upholding of stature” as a dangerous distraction from the real job of replacing it with something that will ensure our security and prosperity in a world where that hegemony is no longer possible. Once Bush destroyed our moral authority in Iraq, it became Obama’s and Biden’s job to achieve the soft landing. They failed miserably at leading the nation towards this goal, and achieved nothing (or negative-nothing) at such critical tasks as restoring our military and our defense sector to fitness for purpose, building effective ways to resist cultural and information warfare, and addressing our economic and social weaknesses. Nobody is fooled by this vamping we are doing as the global hegemon. In fact, the more we pretend, the weaker we look, and the bolder our enemies become. The big problem the Europeans have is not whether they will defend civilization from the Russians but whether they will not go back to extinguishing each other as they did before the Americans took away all their toys. As Americans, we can and should honor our legacy to the world, to which we gave 80 years of peace and prosperity. We should be unsentimental now about moving to the next stage, which is now urgent.
The whole “most voters pay attention only to what’s in front of their faces” thing is such a canard and easy-out.
Thank you for clarity. I misunderstood.
Truth
Was there a point buried in there?
Several. It is curious you did not dispute any of them--but then again the massive sabotage to the U.S.'s great power status Trump is currently perpetrating is fairly indisputable. It's just happening so fast average Americans haven't yet gotten their head around it. Once they do, though...well, just take a look at what has historically happened to the prospects of either party when they made Americans look like 'losers'.
Same thing. What's your point? You sound like an Ivy League grad student who's done a once-over in this or that PolySci class. Democratic staffer, by chance?
I can't do the comprehension for you. Like I said, I made several points--if you're looking for the first, begin by actually reading the post at the top of the thread, in which I point out that in focusing on the short-run picture painted by polling, while bracketing foreign policy developments, Ruy's analysis is vastly underestimating the degree to which Trump is essentially digging a hole far deeper than any in which his opposition sits. Maintain your reading comprehension for a bit longer and you'll then see flowing from that the explanatory elaboration that this digging consists of Trump's efforts to dismantle the U.S.'s great power status and subordinate the country to a de facto Eurasian hegemon--something which Americans simply won't forgive him for, owing to a long-running American exceptionalist mentality.
Then, if you manage to at last make it to the end, you will arrive here, in this strange but oddly entertaining discursive ouroboros you have put us in, where in order to remind you that you must read a text in order to comprehend it, I wind up giving you cliff notes on a thread you probably should have labored to understand yourself before contributing to.
The core problem for Democrats is their Congressional leadership comes from radically gerrymandered congressional districts or deep blue states. Thus, it's difficult for Democrats to adopt positive General Election messaging. Add in that both parties depend on Wall Street and corporate money elites, and D. C. Democrats can remain very comfortable as the professional minority party.