The tension in the US system is between founders who believed in the virtue of the commoner and founders who feared mobocracy. At various levels of the system, the system is designed to be elitist. And the parties are fundamentally private institutions and can be as populist or elitist as they want (worth noting: in practice, the GOP constitution is more populist than the Democrat constitution, which is one of the reasons they nominated Trump; there weren't backstops in the GOP like superdelegates to push him off the ticket).

The Electoral College is often cited as serving a similar purpose... I think recent events show despite paying the consistent premium it extracts in elitist gatekeeping, when it finally mattered it failed to provide the promised protection against unethical demagogues.

2) republican candidate considered a crook

3) it's in Chicago

Whatever they do, don't do what the DNC did in 1968 again, lets try to at least make new mistakes this time I guess?

Chicago Mayor Daley and his police force made the mistakes with the protestors, much of the media coverage of the police riots falsely made it look like it was happening right outside the convention site.

I won't pretend to know the history well enough to know if there was any workable approach then, but the convention process in 1968 definitely didn't work to produce a candidate Dems were excited about at the end of it, the turnout was low and Humphrey lost in a landslide.

Also, I think some of it was happening right outside the convention site - Dan Rather was famously manhandled on national television by security guards while trying to interview someone leaving the convention.

Also, I just read that Harris has money pouring in. The donors may effectively decide this before anyone else can get traction.

And an issue with just spending money is that we have to wait a year or two to figure out if the spent money was effective (unlikely?).

In terms of core policy reform beneath all of the money spending: the current administration seems to place much greater emphasis on capital projects (repairing and building new infrastructure, including energy infrastructure) than the previous one did.

The IRA is trying to address climate change, yes. But there's the problem of relying on government to have any idea of where to inject money to make the most difference, trusting the government to not just inject money wherever it benefits the most politically connected, and avoiding massive fraud (see the SBA loans during COVID). Not to mention the insane irony of something called the "Inflation Reduction Act" being a massive spending bill.

Point being: Number of bills passed and billions of dollars spent will be terrible metrics for how effective a politician is because of all those nuances.

Using Trump as an excuse for not passing any bills on immigration, LGBT rights, abortion, etc when he didn't hold any political position for 4 years is the very definition of ineffective leadership.

"Senior Senate Republicans are furious that Donald Trump may have killed an emerging bipartisan deal over the southern border, depriving them of a key legislative achievement on a pressing national priority and offering a preview of what’s to come with Trump as their likely presidential nominee.

In recent weeks, Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise being delicately hashed out in the Senate, according to GOP sources familiar with the conversations – in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November and doesn’t want President Joe Biden to score a victory in an area where he is politically vulnerable."

I'm just curious.. in your mind, what was the objective of storming the beach at Normandy? What do you think Americans were fighting to preserve?

That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

to my understanding, he wasn't afraid of splitting the vote and was vocal about it as far back as 2022. And apparently the R's that publicly slammed him did not want to call that bluff.

So... maybe?

Also this so-called immigration bill contained billions for Ukraine, Israel, etc. That along with the fact that most of the bill sought only to facilitate getting more migrants through the system more quickly, and of course the bill was DOA. Saying it was Trump who killed it is just conjecture, and reactions from Senate and House Republicans indicates there was zero support for the bill as written.

Interestingly the House passed an immigration bill in 2023 that the Senate never voted on. Along with the removal of all of Trump's border-related executive orders, it indicates that Democrats are not seriously interested in border security.

It all played out in public, just like everything with Trump. There is no need to lie shamelessly on HN, it won’t get you anything.

I'd rather listen to the thoughts of the Speaker directly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii0tl8d5G3g

There is no chance Republicans would vote for that bill, they don't need Trump to persuade them.

> And an issue with just spending money is that we have to wait a year or two to figure out if the spent money was effective

That’s an issue with practically all legislation.

And continuing the trade war. Then people act surprised when inflation is high. Recently, I think Jay Powell has even called out congress and the president for continuing to spend.

Question out of curiosity, not a challenge. I don't follow US politics that closely.

TL;DR: 100% credit? Of course not. But has Biden's administration been more effective at advancing its policies through the legislative than the previous administration? IMO yes.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Plan

Slava Ukraine

Solar is immensely cheap to the point where it's often cheaper than arbitrary other surfaces. Their maintenance is very low, much more so than nuclear. And land is not an issue for the US or China, the two places where decarbonizing energy is most important. Both have massive swaths of desert that is uninhabited, and where the addition of shade will likely net benefit the local ecosystem.

I agree that solar panel creation produces a fair amount of pollution, but then, so does nuclear power generation. In both cases this can and should be dealt with safely.

Edit: Yea. That’s what I thought.

It's very possible to construct an argument (certainly I'd believe it) that it didn't actually affect inflation per se and that the inflation burst was transient and would have subsided anyway. It's absolutely not correct to say inflation wasn't "addressed".

Has it not? Mine has. Wages as a whole have. In fact wage growth has been historically robust for the last decade or so. Here's a FRED graph for "median usual weekly real[1] earnings", which correlates well to the kind of working class argument people usually make in this space: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Note how it has been going inexorably upwards since 2014 or so, and in fact the inflation burst turns out to be the correction to a very rapid spike in wages (due to pandemic assistance) that only corrects downward to the upward curve.

I really wish people who wanted to argue about inflation would do it with more numbers and less "lol".

[1] "Real" means "inflation adjusted" in this context

I'm literally linking to FRED charts trying to have a numerate discussion about this stuff...

Can you cite some research or measurements or anything about this "perceived inflation" metric you're talking about? Like, where are the numbers? I'm pretty sure you just made it up, no?

Just linking a bunch of numbers does not make an argument. You have to actually talk and respond to the actual topic being discussed.

But in the real world, you do admit that current inflation as traditionally understood by centuries of economics is a little under 3% right now, right?

And absolutely not lol, the numbers are cooked up, as I said before. You are really really bad at reading comprehension.

To wit: you're just simply wrong here, and instead of arguing from a rational basis you're hiding behind your philosophical right to be wrong about whatever you want. And that's very distressing to see on a site like HN.

And now we're doing goalpost motion. This is how this always goes. Indeed, some things are more expensive and some things are less expensive. And that can change across regions and subeconomies, and even demographically to the extent that different groups spend in different ways. And this is interesting and important.

But it's absolutely not about "inflation" or "wages" and if you come back from an incorrectly-stated argument about inflation/affordability/whatever by saying "OK fine but this is actually about housing policy", you just look silly.

The fact that housing is expensive in some markets isn't a refutation that people are making more money, it just isn't.

EDIT:

But in fact FRED is great, so I generated your chart for you showing the ratio of the CPI urban rent metric to nominal (not "real" this time) hourly earnings: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1qtNi

And.. you're kinda wrong here too. It's true that the chart is going upwards, but only by about 8-9% since 2006 (the earliest date where we have both data points). And very notably:

1. Most of the growth was from 2011-2018 or so, not a recent phenomenon at all

2. There was a huge dip during the pandemic (because of assistance programs, it's the same effect I mentioned upthread) that we've only just recovered from in the last few months. The recent rapid rise of "rent costs as a fraction of income" is just taking back all the boon people got earlier.

3. It's actually levelled off since 2023.

Again, there's data to this stuff, and it doesn't support your position.

There's a reason the GOP aren't touching most of the provisions in the first 3 Acts (especially with Vance as Veep). [0][1]

Vance is backed by Horowitz and Andreessen, and both heavily benefited from the IRA and CHIPS various provisions (but got hit by the capital gains tax changes that Biden proposed a couple months ago [2]).

The biggest issue was the Biden admin's inability to promote the impact of all of these. Biden hasn't been campaigning across America as much as his predecessors.

[0] - https://www.eiu.com/n/us-election-its-impact-on-industrial-p...

[1] - https://www.eiu.com/n/us-election-its-impact-on-us-trade-pol...

[2] - https://a16z.com/the-little-tech-agenda/

> MADLAND: Yeah, I talked to a lot of workers on the site, and this is this very large facility in rural Tennessee, a couple hours outside of Memphis. It's going to be a big electric vehicle battery and manufacturing construction in an area that had for 20, 30 years, really tried to spur investment, and nothing had happened. [...] So these big steps forward in their lives that you can see from these projects, which are good union jobs, constructing the big facility. Then when I also spoke to them and said, well, how or why do you think this project came to be? This project received many billions of dollars in loans from the federal government as part of these investments we're talking about. It also received significant state funding. And the workers to unanimously said, Well, I credit Ford, which is the big Ford Motor Company as a joint investment there. And then I would probe and push and they'd say, Well, I also credit my union for helping make this happen. I had to keep asking and asking before ever mention any elected officials that had anything to do with it. But their sentiment was, well, if any, elected official had anything to do with it. So I would like that and support them, but I have no idea about this.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-ford-ev-battery-plan...

https://apnews.com/article/ford-electric-vehicles-battery-te...

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/g-s1-9460

The issue was Biden was over-managed because of his reputation of "Bidenisms" for which he has been mocked about for decades [0][1]

This meant he kept campaigning to a minimum and was extremely managed.

It kept gaffes to a minimum but also severely decreased his media time.

[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/joe-biden-unspools-a...

[1] - https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/joe-biden-bi...

Budget deficits have been smaller under Biden though.

But I don't buy the point that current president is good because he is not as bad as previous in spending.

Seeing as Trump is a Republican, and that his spending and economy were on brand for the Republican party, I see no reason to assume covid was the sole cause. (Is it your opinion is that Trump is a RINO who runs the country like a Democrat, and covid disguised that?)

Given that the US economy has recovered from covid dramatically better than the economies of all other major nations, I am not inclined to assume that the US economy is currently in poor hands. On the contrary, it sure seems to be in the best hands that exist anywhere in the world.

as I said I don't think checking historical trends is excuse for current policy.

> Seeing as Trump is a Republican, and that his spending and economy were on brand for the Republican party, I see no reason to assume covid was the sole cause

first two years of his presidency deficit was relatively low

> Given that the US economy has recovered from covid dramatically better than the economies of all other major nations, I am not inclined to assume that the US economy is currently in poor hands. On the contrary, it sure seems to be in the best hands that exist anywhere in the world.

this is a loaded question. Recovery was in expense of inflation, rise of debt. One would need to do some quantitative calculation to see if current situation is result of actual policies (and which policies: Trump's or Biden's), or just economy is flexible itself and if result could be better and if spendings were justified(or went to real estate market and stocks).

I wasn't excusing current policy. I was making the case that Trump's economic failures were due in large part to Republican Party policies, not just to covid.

>first two years of his presidency deficit was relatively low

It took him a while to overcome Obama's economic policies, but he was certainly making headway in damaging the US economy and increasing deficit spending by the time covid hit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_Donal...

>this is a loaded question.

Well, that's a novel use of the term "loaded question". It wasn't even a question at all; it was a simple statement of my opinion.

>One would need to do some quantitative calculation...

Fortunately, the field of economics is dedicated to doing quantitative calculations and making assessments like these.

Economists strongly favor policies that Democrats tend to adopt (especially demand-side economics: think lower taxes for the poor and higher taxes for the rich and for businesses, relief of personal debt, a stronger safety net for the unemployed, cheaper and more accessible healthcare, more spending on public services that aid economic development such infrastructure and education, etc.) and oppose economic policies that Republicans tend to adopt (especially supply-side economics: lower taxes for the rich and for businesses, union busting, a weaker safety net for the unemployed, healthcare that preferences insurance companies, reduced spending or even outright privatization of public services that aid economic development such as the postal service, etc.).

could you give citation, who are those economists? Or all of them? Or majority?

You are making very many unobvious statements with chatgpt confidence.

There are other places as well, but this is the most accessible one I know of for people without access to economics publications.

since you failed to provide citation, further discussion is not interesting to me.

I formed my understanding of economists' opinions on policy by reading data like this. It's highly educational, very easy to read, and not biased and cherry-picked like articles and opinion pieces are.

If pure data in a highly accessible format not good enough for you, it sounds like nothing would be.

Plenty of peer funds did the same thing.

Even if Trump wins in November, most of the provisions in the acts I mentioned will be retained, especially given that a Thiel and A16Z acolyte is Veep and an early MS alum is cabinet track.

This is a MASSIVE change in the VC/PE industry which has concentrated on various flavors of SaaS for the past decade+.

An entire ecosystem of research grants, commercialization grants, and private sector deal flow has now restarted in the sectors above that hasn't been seen in the past decade.

But I believe in market economy, and to me it looks like VC/PE didn't invest into hardware much because didn't believe in positive ROI in current condition.

Not exactly.

It was because of the upfront cost and lack of deal flow.

Before the various IRA and CHIPS provisions passed, you might get $200k at most from grants to commercialize research in the Energy or Hardware space. The rest would be fronted from the private sector so you're looking at an additional $800k-1M of private money at the pre-seed/seed stage. On top of that, deal flow was weak, so it's harder to fund later series or get good exits during an M&A event.

This is a very high upfront cost so obviously SaaS made sense due to much higher margins.

After IRA and CHIPS, you could expect to see an additional $300-500k in grants, which means my upfront cost in funding is lower.

Furthermore, the government is providing tax credits and grants to private sector players to minimize the amount of upfront money they need to spend (say) building a Battery Recycling plant or a Chip Packaging factory.

This means there is now much more money sloshing in these segments as a significant portion of my upfront risk has been subsidized by the US government. That money can now be deployed in either funding research projects commercializing into startups, re-investing in existing players to help their own M&A strategy, and funding additional research in the spaces above.

Surviving four years without starting a new boots on ground war (also Trump gets credit for that)

Calling out china on its bs (also Trump gets credit for that)

In practical terms the big differentiating factor between Biden and Trump terms is that trump is soft-pro-putin and Biden is anti-putin. And trump freed some black prisoners who probably shouldn't be in jail anymore

Moving forward, Biden is likely to be pro-taiwan and trump has been making anti-taiwan rhetoric

Modern politics is such a hole - we are praising a politician for not starting a war.

> Calling out china on its bs What does it mean?

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/joe-biden-age-conditi...

- 'he' managed to allow a record number of people to illegally cross the borders and helped those people along by flying them to non-border states

- 'he' oversaw one of the largest increases in costs of living in recent memory

- 'he' certainly won when it came to using executive orders to push through policies which 'he' - most likely correctly - thought would not otherwise make it through the house and senate.

- 'he' did not allow silly things like the supreme court stop him from attempting to buy voters by cancelling their student loan debt.

- 'he' oversaw one of the largest armaments transfers to an adversary when 'he' ordered the withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan without leaving a token force of a few thousand behind to make sure those weapons and material were either shipped out or destroyed. To put this in contrast with a well-known historical armaments transfer to an adversary: the 'Iran-Contra' deal relates to a $30 million sale of missiles to Iran in 1986 and the use of $18 million of that money to fund the "Contra's" - anti-communist insurgents fighting the communist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. $30 million in 1986 is equivalent with $86 million in 2024. Biden's withdrawal left the Taliban with at least $7 billion worth of material but possibly more - the estimate goes from a minimum of $7 billion to more than $10 billion.

- 'he' was a master in creatively (ab)using government agencies to push through his agenda, e.g. by using OSHA to get companies with 100+ employees to force those employees to get one of the experimental COVID vaccines.

Etcetera. A lot was done during Biden's presidency so in that sense 'he' was an effective president. It is up to the beholder to decide whether a lot of 'good' was done during 'his' presidency. I use quotes around 'he' and 'his' because it is as of yet unclear how much of the above 'achievements' were actually Biden's work and how much was done only in his name.

Are you aware this is actually what multiple RNC candidates were doing?

> 'he' did not allow silly things like the supreme court stop him from attempting to buy voters by cancelling their student loan debt

This is moronic. Farmers receive the most subsidies, is the RNC buying their votes by enacting policy? You could call literally anything "buying votes"

Your post is beyond biased, it's contradicting itself.

Sure, they flew migrants to 'sanctuary cities' - remember the panic on Martha's Vineyard when a few of them showed up and remember how quickly they were shuffled away by the virtuous inhabitants of that island - to demonstrate the magnitude of the problem. They were very vocal about it and did it out in the open, inviting press and publishing widely about their intents. That is not what I referred to. I was referring to the secretive night flights ordered by Biden's government, something along these lines:

https://homeland.house.gov/2024/04/30/new-documents-reveal-a...

a subpoena of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) [...] identified over 50 airport locations, including our nation’s capital, used by DHS to help process into the country more than 400,000 inadmissible aliens through the administration’s unlawful Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (CHNV) mass-parole program. The program was officially launched in January 2023, and the documents obtained by the Committee cover the period from January-August 2023—accounting for roughly 200,000 of these individuals.

> This is moronic. Farmers receive the most subsidies, is the RNC buying their votes by enacting policy?

Apart from the fact that both parties are in on the farm subsidy racket - the main difference being that the 'democrats' specifically target 'farmers of colour' through the 'black farmer relief program' [1] - there is a clear difference in that those programs have been going on for decades while the 'student loan debt forgiveness' scheme popped into existence at just the right time to attract voters for the upcoming elections.

And yes, of course my post is biased, I am after all playing devil's advocate to defend the 'effective' Biden presidency in ways most likely not intended by the parent poster.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/us/black-farmers.html

And? You are aware that promising to do things for voters that aren't being done yet is not exactly a Machiavellian scheme. It's how a policy gets started. Do we just not do anything because that would be new and scary?

I know you're pretending to play devils advocate but you are transparently being critical of politicians doing the bare minimum of their job because they have a D next to their name. Devils advocate means you are taking a position you don't agree with for the exercise of it. You are making bad faith statements about a party you visibly hate.

Blue=good Red=bad

On the contrary, the processes that anointed Hillary in 2016 and Biden round 2 in 2024 were exactly the kind of "well, it's this person's turn now" decisions that were bad, anti-democratic (lower-case d) choices previously. I'm not looking for a "circular firing squad" but neither do I think some sort of automatic anointment of Harris is what people want either.

Regardless of what people want (and FWIW I agree that Hilary getting rammed down our throats was highly anti-democratic) at this stage of the game, Harris is the only person who can benefit from Biden's warchest. Barring somebody like Dwayne Johnson deciding to enter politics and stealing the show, Harris is the solitary candidate who is poised to hit the ground running with an adequate campaign today. And with so little time before the election, I think the only choice Democrats have today is to hold their noses and vote.

Unless they had some tricky campaign finance exception, it had to be Harris.

Hillary Clinton basically took control over the DNC through financial dealings that Brazile (who took over as head of the DNC after these dealings) characterized as "if not illegal, then at least unethical".

But we all have this idea that our candidate will win in a perfect situation that the party will never give us, and while it's good to argue for choices, I'm skipping past the inevitable frustration. Harris was nowhere near my first choice, now or in 2020, but she is qualified. Realistically it's going to be her, whether we agree now or in a few weeks.

I agree that it's best if she earns it, but "earn" looks like something different to everyone and to some, nothing will be enough because their preferred candidate didn't win.

You think it's notably corrupt that... an incumbent president gets to run for re-election? You might argue this was a bad idea. You could argue it's counter to the way the campaign was presented in 2020. But it's hardly surprising; it's literally the way we've done things for hundreds of years!

The Democrats have got it all going for them; both in absolute numbers of votes and also of financial support. Life is interesting...

He did not really do this.

[1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/11/biden-single-term-0...

It’s definitely one of those thing that make people like me, who want good faith honesty in politics angry, because “he didn’t actually say it” politics is why gotcha politics exists.

Everyone expected him to drop out earlier, but I think the reason he stayed in as long as he did was to take all the bullets for Kamala until he felt confident all the other potential challengers would get behind her.

What he didn't want to do was drop out early, let Kamala get battered and bloodied by her own party nomination process, win the nomination, then lose to Trump just because she'd been dragged through the mud in the media for months.

The more simple explanation, in my opinion, is that Biden is exactly what some had thought for over a year now - a person getting older and starting to run into cognitive and physical decline. I've watched multiple family members go through this, and the picture of a person in the middle of decline lying to themselves about their new reality and stubbornly refusing to accept it fits perfectly well.

  "Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else," Biden said. "There's an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country."

(To clarify my political position, i'm pro-Democrat and think Biden wasn't a bad president, though i think he completely dropped the ball on the foreign policy - while Ukraine and Israel are more prominent, they cause multipage flamewars, so instead i'd point to Houthis where i think majority can agree with me that what Houtis do in Red Sea is just plain war crimes (intentional attacks on civilian shipping) and that should have been immediately nipped in the bud by the overwhelming US and allies' force in the region - if anything, protection of civilian shipping is one of the most legitimate major uses of the Navy, and i'd say it is a direct duty of the president to put it to such a use when the need arises)

As I understand it this was the position of the US Founders as well (and it is also mine).

There was a whole primary with like 12 other candidates and Biden won though. Bernie, Warren, Andrew Yang all had their shot, some did pretty well, but ultimately the democratic base voted for Biden

Does no one remember what actually happened?

All the other candidates except Warren made back room deals and dropped out around Iowa, suddenly and for no reason. Leaving Biden as the obvious selection, and Warren there to siphon off Bernie support to make sure he wouldn’t be a problem.

The base voted for Biden after they had no choice.

Biden keeps saying democracy is at stake but the DNC seems to keep avoid any democratic process to find their candidate.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilding_v._DNC_Services_Corp.

People like to imagine that the Parties are these kind of quasi-public entities that exist to serve the American people. They’re not. They’re private entities that are vehicles for the acquisition of power across local, State and Federal offices that are in a perpetual term-based competition with each other. We tolerate their campaigns because their battlefield is the ballot box instead of actual fields, but nominee selection still happens at conventions run by the parties themselves.

The Primary system you are familiar with is one that the Republicans and Democrats chose for themselves to inform their overall decisions on who to put forward as the candidate flying under their banner and has only been around since 1972.

https://www.newsweek.com/msnbc-host-chris-matthews-ties-bern...

The associated press wouldn't even call a winner for the Iowa caucus due to how poorly it was run https://apnews.com/article/fc6777e93b8c50b2fd20e0d31fcc43b3

There were definitely some interesting things going on in the 2020 Democratic primaries.

They quit because they got their faces ripped off in a fair fight, not because of some backroom party shenanigans.

Harris being immediately endorsed by basically all of the alternative candidates (Newsom, Whitmer, etc.) shows that her campaign has its shit together, and moving through the nomination process without conflict leaves fewer weaknesses for the opposition to take advantage of.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/09/politics/joe-biden-bridge...

So to call it effective is to only look domestically. His international performance was not great.

The biggest EV manufacturers in the U.S. are Tesla and Ford, as far as I can tell. No Chinese manufacturer I'm aware of has made significant inroads.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-19/trump-wel...

That hasn’t been because of Biden. It’s because they make non-US market vehicles specifically.

We can’t make $5000 new vehicles. They can’t pass our regulations and standards while making the profits they like.

I worked with Beijing Jeep awhile back. They have no interest in the US market.

The first clue to differentiating a contingency from an active plan is resource allocation. Russia moved about 80,000 troops to the Ukrainian border a full 13 months before the invasion. That's over 50% of the force that would eventually enter Ukraine in February 2022 and also about 25% to 35% of Russia's entire non-conscript military force.

Putin would have just thought up another "reason" to invade in a year or two.

No wait a minute, Putin did invade Georgia! He was going to invade Ukraine no matter what appeasement offerings were presented.

But then again, maybe there's some merit to Putin's paranoia that NATO is "gobbling" up these countries to create a military circle around Russia in preparation for a future invasion. At least in his understanding, that's a logical conclusion.

But he must knows he's running the country like a thug, with oligarchs being forced to tithe to him, and he hates the idea of citizens revolting to topple down other thugs (like they did in Ukraine), because if that idea catches on, that might happen to him too. I wonder if he draws a faulty conclusion that these revolutions are EU/NATO/Western-engineered because they're evil, instead of coming from the citizens themselves who are fed up with being robbed by the elite.

Hah, ironcally enough, Russia runs a propaganda network (or so we've been told) that tricks the population in EU/USA to moan about their rulers and be rightwing populists...

For the non-stupid answer to your opposite-of-that question: these are takes, and for one thing I claimed, I said "he must", i.e. it's a guess, because if he doesn't realize he's a thug, he'd be dumb.

OK I did not signify that the sentence "At least in his understanding, that's a logical conclusion." is a guess of mine. My bad?

I put some of the blame on Biden because the botched Afghanistan withdrawal sent the message that the US doesn't want to get involved with regional conflicts, emboldening Russia, Hamas, and Iran.

The agreement was to leave in May. The US left in basically August which is 4 months after the agreed upon time.

That said, if though basically 20 years of "occupation" the US couldn't nation build Afghanistan into being able to defend itself vs the Taliban I don't think you can point at a single president.

Which has been good for the USA. It weakens both russia and europe. And if ukraine doesn't lose, makes them forever in debt to USA.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sNclEgQZQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blqIZGXWUpU

[3] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XgWFwVRGcf4

In other words: GP probably wants, in an ordinary setting, to have their views understood (why bother responding at all if not?). In which case they should similarly set aside some space for understanding why others don’t share them.

- A few of the people you mentioned are somewhat polarising, so folks who dislike them, might downvote

- in a measure of a president's efficacy, mentioning people who think a president is ineffective isn't as convincing as say mentioning actions of the president that were ineffective. You will, for any president, be able to find a large number of people who will passionately argue for/against that president's effectiveness.

- Your sources are very long videos, which discourage verifying if folks want to see what they said about him. Eg "Here's why he's in effective: [3 hours of podcasts]"

- One of your sources is a podcast which features Trump himself, which greatly brings into doubt the objectivism of the video

- the Zuckerberg short is very speculative, further weakening this collection of sources

- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/17/co-f...

- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-16/andreesse...

- https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-fou...

Here's a broader article on Silicon Valley support for Trump (potentially paywalled):

- https://www.ft.com/content/e2ffd807-1c18-436c-9f70-2fa7181ac...

- The FT article includes the following names: Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Shervin Pishevar, Keith Rabois, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, Doug Leone, Shaun Maguire, Joe Lonsdale, Jacob Helberg

Please keep in mind that not too long ago vocal support for Trump could get you fired (and still might). Fighting against censorship is important.

Like “well, this collection of the weirdest Silicon Valley people available took some time out of their busy schedule of hawking bitcoin or metaverses or magic robots or whatever to give a Very Important Opinion” is _not_ the world’s strongest argument.

It seems like this is really going to be a "for Trump" and "against Trump" election at this point. Nobody's going to leap out and knock anybody's socks off this close to the wire. All the dems need to do is present any body people are reasonably sure will still be warm in four years. The results won't differ much.

Uh, who? Certainly there are people who have their own opinions out there somewhere, but virtually every name brand democrat over the past few hours has either explicitly endorsed Harris or notably avoided boosting a different candidate. And absolutely no one is going even the tiniest bit negative on Harris, at all.

No, it seems like a fait accompli at this point. Add to that her control over the almost $100M campaign warchest, and... yeah. The fight now is over who gets to be VP.

  > One of the most effective presidents since Johnson or Truman.

> But he did campaign on a single term.

Biden said that he was running for only a single term, and during this entire second election campaign nobody called him out on that, not even outspoken Trump?

There's more; that's just the first two years.

https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/03/what-to-know-about-all-thr...

Maybe? Gretchen Whitmer might be a strong candidate, off the top of my head. But I'm struggling to think of a nationally known candidate with super-strong positives that would be a viable alternative. (That's also true for the GOP IMO if somehow Trump was out.)

No idea if he’d be interested but Mark Kelly would be a great candidate to try and win independents.

At this point the VP has the most legitimacy as a successor and given the situation we’re forced into she’s unambiguously the option. That doesn’t make it good, but it makes it better than all the other terrible options that involve a free-for-all between candidates with no opportunity for voters to weigh in.

The best possible outcome at this point is for the establishment to quickly and unanimously get behind Harris. Again, it’s not necessarily a good outcome. But it’s the best available to us thanks to Biden waiting for the last possible moment (again) to come to this realization.

Basically, the DNC's options are the people who failed to get through the primaries in 2020 against Biden and maybe Whitmer or Newsom.

I just do not see Harris getting the middle/undecided, and it's 2016 all over again, if not worse, because SCOTUS has the deck stacked if it's even close.

The polling seemed too convenient. I don't have a link handy, but the best poll process I saw after the debate did show Harris doing better than Biden, but she was still worse off than a few of the other Democratic potentials.

And probably the wrong answer. I don’t see her winning over swing voters. Gretchen Whitmer seems like the best option to me. I’d enjoy watching her debate Trump.

Obama's charisma and youth surely helped a lot. Trump is tall and he was a good-looking young man, and his swagger has let him get away with being a total POS for 77-78 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

Believe it or not, there are people in this world that is not immediately swayed by either waving your totem pole or burning the strawman with the opponents face. You witness a raging mob or a 100% sure fool once in your life and the magic of tribalists shouting loud being convincing, might shatter.

Those will still be swayed by emotional or other marketing tactics that appeal to their convictions, but if they managed to stay undecided in such a polar political climate like USA, my guess is that what they see are two fanatic ends of the horseshoe, and they either decides to disengage from it all or take their time to assessment which one is the lesser dummheit[1]

[1] https://nsjonline.com/article/2021/12/bonhoeffer-on-stupidit...

We only know the name of the Republican candidate at this time. You can make your decision how you want, I’ll make mine when I see who I have to decide between.

while she has admirable sympathies and even consistent policy, she has clearly demonstrated she's not opposed to pushing an agenda she does not understand.

Seems like America has been going backwards for a long time.

The first sentence is basically just signing normal budget agreements? The chips decision sounds like the best decision that was actually pushed after Covid.

Maybe a resignation will be announced later for maximum impact and tie into some thing ready for Harris to announce presidentially, like some camp david peacing or another 3 states ratifying the ERA.

I imagine those around him were doing all the presidenting, and perhaps they're more effective without a functioning president to get in their way.

Some might then point out things like the border were signs of ineffectiveness, but actually, if you reasonably assume it was intentional, then they were exceptionally effective.