Are you sure, it seems mostly based on illegal share trading. Murdering foreigners and sending soldiers to die is a lever Trump/his handlers keep pulling because they 'win' $millions every time.
https://www.ismworld.org/supply-management-news-and-reports/...
> Economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in July for the seventh consecutive month, say the nation’s supply executives in the latest ISM® Manufacturing PMI® Report.
> The report was issued today by Susan Spence, MBA, Chair of the Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) Manufacturing Business Survey Committee.
> “The Manufacturing PMI® registered 55.6 percent in July, 2.3 percentage points above the June figure and the highest reading since May 2022 (55.9 percent). The overall economy continued in expansion for the 21st month in a row.
"Just find US suppliers."
It's not that simple. There are a lot of things that simply aren't made in the US. (The majority of tool steels, all titanium alloys, everything made of tungsten, and I could go on all day.)
Besides, dealing with the Chinese is like life on easy mode. Handshake agreements are always respected. In most cases service and support are 24/7. Importantly for QoL, they never make you fill out a dozen forms, pay for a D&B report, "let's get on a Zoom call to touch base," and all of that nonsense. American B2B firms aren't really into customer service, as a general rule, I think.
Even the MAGA folks I have to deal with are bitter about it. They still voted for Trump but they can't deny the cause and effect. I think they'd still vote for Trump though. I don't understand how they manage to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
It's funny... laugh.
Feel free to come back when you have something to add.
> I can't imagine having a conversation with someone like this for more than five minutes.
Judging from this and all your other dead comments, you don't seem inclined to have a conversation at all.
I'm sure fox news will give them some Olympic tier training in mental gymnastics and they'll be blaming - with certainty and conviction - brown people, democrats, trans people and/or women in no time.
> I don't understand how they manage to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
A family friend recently sent me this and it's been helpful to wrap my head around some of the naked hypocrisy:
``` The reason they aren’t more bothered by Q constantly getting things wrong, why they aren’t more bothered by the extreme inconsistencies and outright contradictions, by the claims that are just materially wrong, is because it gives them power over others who are bound by something as weak and flimsy as reality.
They claim to be against corruption while hanging their hopes on an openly corrupt man, and that naked hypocrisy is the point.
They will effortlessly carve out an exception because it makes them exceptional. They engage in wild hypocrisy as an act of domination, adhering to something demonstrably untrue out of spite, because they believe that power belongs to those with the greatest will to take it, and what greater sign of will than the ability to override truth?
Their will is a hammer that they are useing to beat reality itself into a shape of their choosing, a simple world where reality is exactly what it looks like through their eyes, devoid of complexity, devoid of change, where they are right and their enemies are silent.
They are trying to build a Flat Earth. ```
And of course there’s those that know exactly how wrong and awful this is, but support it out of self interest anyway (eg: Marco Rubio). That’s even worse.
A hypothesis: The "spite" is secondary to their insecurity and fear of not belonging to a "safe" group, in a world they assume has vicious and unavoidable hierarchies or cruelty. Having the out-group hurt (or even just baffled) occurs in service of that.
Professing and supporting stupid beliefs is "loyalty", an expensive (and therefore prominent) signal of membership. Like tattooing Dear Leader's name on one's forehead. It's less an opinion one holds and more a song they sing to fit in with the flock.
I find that focus on insecurity and loneliness and fear—versus the reward of belonging—a bit more comprehensible than spite as its own reward.
AKA shibboleths
Further, the rhetoric creates a permission structure which allows (enables?) people to be their worst selves.
Why Farmers Voted for Trump https://youtube.com/watch?v=badGHJLDpP8
Trudeau was a colossal cluster f of a prime minister, but he’s nowhere in the same ballpark.
Are they MAGA?
Inconel is through the roof and I know a few aerospace clients who are MONTHS behind due to shortages and bonkers material costs. Like holding up the military supply chain which is ludicrous. This admin is brain dead.
Same too with customers. The people buying bulk metal need is when they need it. They don't want to wait around, literally, for the winds to change.
The aluminium smelters I've had contact with have all avoided any shutdowns (back up generators, etc) because any significant breakdown in continuous processing involves several days of tear down in order to restart.
I am literally within 20 feet of someone who worked 5 years as a general foreman in charge of the smelter portion of the Portland aluminium smelter* who is not embracing the idea that this a process you can just turn off and turn on again later w/out a large chunk of effort.
I think at a steel smelter, since the heat does the work, they aren't as easily separable. You would still use less energy at the times when you processed less metal.
Aluminium smelters were traditionally some of the biggest loads on the grid. They were built near hydroelectric dams and had contracts with electricity providers to absorb excess energy and to pause operations on short notice when other demand is high. In exchange for this they get it very cheap, which is good because they need a lot of it. Variable energy supply is not new to them.
Now I've never worked at either and I'm just spitballing ideas on the internet, but you haven't either and you are too.
YMMV - Soviet Russia comes to mind. Still better than ‘feels’.
It's simply facing the same fate of agriculture: automation.
Politicians want to sell to people they can bring back manufacturing jobs, but it's not like in china they making cars or batteries or chips by hand. It's all automated everywhere.
> it's not like china they making cars or batteries or chips by hand
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1jci...
They mean it is not the case that in China they make these things by hand.
(edit: seriously? Who downvotes this. The preceeding comment mentions a video, I share the source, wtf. Don't shoot the messenger.)
Is a factory making 2GB RAM chips twice as productive as one making 1GB RAM sticks?
Because if manufacturing output is merely constant while chipmakers’ output has skyrocketed (on paper, as PCs went from 32MB RAM to 32GB over a few decades), other manufacturing output must have fallen a great deal.
The baseline Republican base doesn’t give a shit about the more extreme racist stuff, they don’t care about women being raped, etc they tolerate it. But they hate paying taxes above all else.
Trump closed the stretch IRA loophole in 45, and implemented the largest tax increase in recent history with the tariff regime. Only the really rich people and real estate folks get the big tax breaks.
If someone asks Chuck Schumer what the weather is like, he should say: “It’s a good summer day, but it would be a great one if tax and spend Trump released the Epstein files”
I feel like the Dems should have an easy time in the next elections if they don't fumble it given the current state of things. On the other hand, they seem to purity test each other in ways that make such a coalition harder to attain.
The weak kneed leadership will be getting replaced by the populist message of Trump but coming from the left, people like Mamdani, the DSA candidates, etc.
The people clearly want leaders who will say : we will use political tools to help the economic situation of the poor and middle class.
Everyone from Jon Ossoff to Angie Nixon has some version of this message and its resonating
clearly they are smartening up
Socialism (to contrast with social-democrats like some European nations which are primarily democracies, free markets, with a social component) is not a democracy those are opposing ideas.
As for their agenda, you are wrong.
"The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States, with over 100,000 members and chapters in all 50 states. We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few."
"Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society."
"democratic socialism" is an oxymoron. socialism conflicts directly with democratic values. At the very least there is no pre-existing example of democracy and socialism working side by side. All previous socialist "experiments" were not democracies.
When you say "socialism conflicts directly with democratic values" I genuinely have no idea what "democratic values" you're talking about.
No it's not, check out Europe, mostly northern countries, it's working just fine.
> At the very least there is no pre-existing example of democracy and socialism working side by side.
Again, northern europe screaming at you.
So you're wrong...
Also, you're Canadian, maybe it's not your business
I feeel those topics are a bit of my business.
In other words, Social Democrat != Democratic Socialist
Scandinavian model relies on competitive private enterprise to create wealth, combined with strong labor union collective bargaining, universal public services, and high consumption/income taxes that apply broadly across society.
DSA seeks to move past or dismantle the capitalist economic system, advocating for social, public, or worker ownership of the means of production.[1]
[1] https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism...
Why are you lieing?
From what i can read they want the same scandinavian model with strong labor unions, universal public services and so on.
From the linked website. Now, that's not quite "the means of production", explicitly stated. It's just "the key economic drivers", so most of the means of production.
Maybe you ought to be a little less quick to accuse others of lying.
Norway collectively owns its 'key economic drivers'.
Is that a bad thing?, they're still capitalistic, just with better respect for its people.
You probably collectively own things via the stock market too.
In socialism with supposed democracy, where the state owns the means of production and supposedly the workers supposedly have a say about everything, they actually end up with a say about nothing (at least not without greasing the right palms in the inevitably corrupt system that arises).
In Social Democracy, capitalism is the underlying system, where corporations and workers can own means of production, but it operates under sufficient regulation that the excesses and systemic failures of captialism (e.g., failure to prevent Tragedies Of The Commons, tendency towards monopoly and excess concentration of power, consistent tendency to abuse and impoverish workers, etc.), you end up with successful systems like Northern Europe.
The two are very different, and we need to hold the DSA people to the latter and not let them sneak in the former.
The term you are looking for is communism, not socialism.
Nordic countries are practicing Democratic Socialism.
DSA is not communist.
Why are you spreading this crap when it takes 2 neurons and a few searches to find out you are wrong?
Different beasts as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49404166
So tell me how Social Democrat parties of Denmark or Sweden views on capitalism same thing as DSA views on it stated in DSA sites I linked elsewhere?
Do these social democrats also want to replace capitalism?
Youre statements peak at a single sentence with minimal signal. You’re not interested in conversations or debates
Skimming through your comments, your only goal is to demonize DSA because they go against your views with respect to Israel.
It doesn't matter to you if what you're saying is true or not, you are not looking for a debate.
* replace capitalism [0]
* own means of production [0]
I state the fact that Scandinavian/Nordic countries are Social Democracies (embracing capitalism) and Not Democratic Socialist countries.
You state that Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism is the same.
I ask you "tell me how Social Democrat parties of Denmark or Sweden views on capitalism same thing as DSA view" [1]
And your response is "nobody wants to replace capitalism, you're being absurd reply" inspite of official DSA statements that i linked to in [0]
My 2 points stand:
* DSA is pretty clear about its desires to replace capitalism [0] and own means of production [0]
* Nordic countries are Social Democracies. THey embrace capitalism, not aim to replace it (as its stated on DSA's own site). Your statement is factually wrong, unless you can find it in your heart to prove me wrong.
I dont know why you felt that bringing Israel discussion about clear socialist goals of DSA will help your argument whatever that is, but try to keep focus about systematic issues with DSA, not geo-political.
That reads as though you’re saying they want to abolish the democratic process, but as somebody living in a country with many of the democratic processes they’re proposing, looking in on what seems like a very dysfunctional democratic process in the US, it seems to be that they want to replace it with a much better version of itself.
Isn't it clear to you that you're misrepresenting DSA's position?
"We want a democracy powered by everyday people. The capitalist class tells us we are powerless, but together we can take back control."
What are they not saying? They are not saying things like we should raise taxes to fund social programs so we can be more like Europe. Europe is capitalist. Europe has free markets. DSA opposes capitalism. DSA wants to, in their words: "We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation.".
What am I not understanding? Barrack Obama wanted accessible healthcare for all, he was not DSA. That's an awesome idea for the US that Democrats rallied behind and partly failed. Show me in DSA's words, material and action, how they are really social-democrats who just want more vacation, healthcare, worker protection while still maintaining capitalist free markets - like Europe. I mean they want all that but not in that way.
I think most of us want a moderate Democrat. I hope populism dies with Trump/MAGA in the coming years. We don’t need to match them with our own distasteful populism.
"Defund the police" was a campaign slogan at last election.
I'm looking from Europe and I'm often impressed how extreme american leftists are. If it's not socialism, it sure shares the same conclusions. And yet "The most extreme left in the US is the most extreme right wing for Europe" is a common belief.
I am often impressed how abusive and violent US policemen are. And they have budgets rivaling the defense spending of whole countries and are armed to the teeth with military grade equipment.
The republican party has become extreme, and they are wrecking your republic
Except form the million of black people living in the south of the US. For them, the USA is a democracy only since 1964.
And if you argue "yes but it got better", the Republicans are making everything to get back to before 1964.
Incidentally, your "we can't let workers decide" sounds a lot like "we can't let negroes vote" or "we can't let women vote". And is as much FUD.
I had a similar discussion in real life. Where we concluded it that Roe vs. Wade being overturned was the biggest step backwards. Most of the other stuff is noise but this one is a biggy that's hard to fix. It sucks for Americans (which I'm not but I was debating an American).
Nobody is saying we can't let workers decide. Most of us are workers. Most of us vote. We are deciding. The US has also made progress on workers' rights at the state level to my understanding. At the end of the day we still have to lean on the democratic process, we need to debate policies and we need to get people to think critically and think things through. This is very hard to do today given the public discourse and tribalism.
And sure, there are also ideas like healthcare for all which I think are similar but that isn't really what the DSA is about. It's definitely not about transforming the USA to have a better social network like healthcare or protection for employees. It's a lot more radical than that.
Yes, they are center-left at best, and your frenzied rebuttal against regular people trying to improve their lives and the country they live in is alarming. Free public transportation..the horror.
> Yes
Respectfully, you may have skimmed some material or watched a couple of minutes of MSNOW, because you wouldn't come to the conclusion that the DSA just wants free public transportation otherwise. Key aspects of the DSA's goals and the actual policy implementation actions of elected DSA-aligned politicians that are quite well aligned with the position of a person holding communist and other relatively extremist sympathies:
- state-controlled grocery stores [0]
- public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries [1]
- abolition in full of police and prisons ("cut police budgets annually toward zero") [1]
- ending sanctions on states backing terrorist activities [1]
- permitting open, uncontrolled immigration [2]
- disregarding the existence of Israel ("democratic secular state [Palestine], from the river to the sea") [3]
- giving voting rights to noncitizens and prisoners [4]
[0] https://edc.nyc/program/nyc-groceries (a city headed by a DSA-aligned mayor)
[1] https://program.dsausa.org/
[2] https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/using-power-builds-po...
[3] https://www.dsausa.org/statements/on-the-ceasefire-in-gaza/
[4] https://program.dsausa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/DSA_WD...
[edited for formatting]
I can’t wrap my head around why you would sacrifice your life and well being so that a small number of people can become impossibly wealthy?
I read those pages and find it absolutely fantastic. How someone could fight for the position to be a wage slave with no security against inflation, cost of living or bankruptcy or homelessness due to illness is frankly insane.
Wouldn't you recognize that bad faith characterizes the DSA lines?
Public-transit where I live is not free, but it is subsidized, with various recent efforts from municipal and state governments to further reduce costs for all residents.
Germany is defined as Social Democracy or a Social Market Economy. It marries free-market capitalism with social welfare policies, state regulation, and collective bargaining to ensure economic growth and social security, including robust social safety nets.
The US once had stronger unions and basic worker-oriented safety nets. This has been dismantled since the 80s, while piling on the National Debt by pilfering the treasury and "returning" the money to the (rich) end of the tax base.
There was a great quote in the original Deus Ex: "In 1945, corporations paid 50 percent of federal taxes. Now they pay about 5 percent."
In my mind the DSA is trying to shift the Overton window towards something more reasonable, that has already existed in the US. Focusing on the extremes to dismiss the DSA entirely is like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Bernie is probably the most well-known democratic socialist in the US, but he is not a member of DSA. By his political positions he would be either in the left wing of Finnish Social Democratic Party or in the mainstream of the Left Alliance. He would probably choose the Left Alliance, since it is more like a coalition of like-minded activists, while the party is the primary actor for the Social Democrats.
AOC, another well-known democratic socialist, would also fit in the Left Alliance. She is part of the moderate wing of DSA. But if you start looking into the ideological wing, you find plenty of actual socialists who would make Finnish mainstream leftists uncomfortable.
> The DSA wants to abolish the existing US democratic process.
So, getting into elected office by winning elections is wanting to abolish the democratic process?
I think I'm beginning to understand why the hardcore MAGA folks loves Trump so much.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/senate-representat...
Incidentally, if I wanted to sabotage a movement, I'd probably try to convince it to adopt ideas I know would be controversial with the wider public
You misspelled "Trump".
There is only one party making it harder for people to vote, and it is the Republican party.
I don't know enough about the Tea Party to confidently give my opinion, I am a bit too young to have been politically aware when they were in their heyday as far as I know.
Smartening up would have been the Democratic Party ejecting Swalwell because he was a known creep. Instead he was the front runner for the CA Governor until like a couple months before the election when scandal, NOT the party cleaning house, took him out.
Leading but honest question: Are those candidates the same as Trump? I do not see how they share anything other than strategy and spin, and those things don't make policy.
Wag the Dog (movie) came out like 3 decades ago
If Chuck Schumer is asked about the weather, he'll first check with Netanyahu.
Just look at what Senatorial campaigns Schumer supports and doesn't. There's a lot of suspicion that Schumer (and the DSCC) is going to leave Abdul El-Sayed out to dry because he's anti-Israel, basically. Mandela Barnes got similar treatment in 2022. And yet you have blockbuster challenges like Jaime Harrison's, which spent $130M to oust Lindsey Graham. He lost by 10. Trump won by 12 so I guess he gained 2? Well done, everybody, the system works.
Oh and what did the DNC do with Jaime Harrison after he spent $130M to lose by 10? They made him the DNC Chair. The Democratic Party loves a loser. Just like Howard Dean.
The DSCC funding is a drop in the bucket of the overall funding in these races, and they have their own goals which may or may not be aligned with the party as a whole.
If your single issue is Israel funding (which it probably shouldn’t be but that is your choice), the Democratic Party and presidents did far more to reign in Israel’s behavior than republicans.
Support for Israel's current government (elections in October 2026) being but one example.
Republicans do this too. Two of the seats they're at most risk of losing are Maine and Alaska held by Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski (respectively). They currently have 53 votes (well, 52 with Mitch McConnell MIA). That means they can pass things with 50 votes (and JD Vance's tie break) on anything that can get past or doesn't require cloture (eg approving judicial nominations, reconcilation). So, every time you have a controversial nomination or bill, you'll often find Collins and Murkowski vote no because their votes aren't needed. The leadership is insulating them from attack. But when their votes are needed, they're there (eg Collins's required vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh).
As for the number of Democratic senators who voted against weapons for Israel, it is significant because it never would've happened 5 years ago, but it's also mostly performative because there's no way it was going to pass.
As another example, Democrats did a rare move to invoke the filibuster last year to stop ICE funding. This resulted in a government shutdown and important programs being punitively defunded (eg there was a reserve fund for food stamps that was intentionally not tapped). What happened? The Republicans needed 60 votes to force a vote. There were 52 votes. 8 Democratic senators crossed the floor to vote with Republicans. That's so weird. It's the exact number required. What a coincidence. Whatever that number was, 1, 5, 8, 12, it doesn't matter. There will most of the time be that number of exact senators requried. This, by the way, is part of the rotating villain role within the Democratic Party.
This is how calculated it was. All 8 of those who crossed the floor were either retiring or they weren't up for re-election in 2026 so the voters couldn't punish them. John Ossoff, the current liberal darling, was going to be one of the 8 but he's facing re-election this year so Chuck Schumer whipped another vote to replace him.
Another classic example was the Epstein transparency act. Trump threatened members who signed the discharge petition. Mike Johnson actually shut down the House for 7 weeks to try and get those that did to change their vote. yet when the discharge petition got 218 votes (the minimum required), suddenly the votes in the House and Senate were almost unanimous. Well, if support was almost unanimous, why not just have a vote to begin with?
Mitch McConnell can really be credited with pioneering a new era of obstruction in the Senate. He realized there was a political cost to some votes. Some things were popular and he didn't want to pass them so he'd just make sure they never made it to the floor for a vote.
So my point is that imagine the Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House in 2029 and that same Israel funding bill came up. Will all those Senators and House representatives vote for it when it might pass and become law? Nope.
However, I also highly doubt Schumer would be in Epstein files. People seem stuck on the meme that being in Epstein files is the main reason why someone acts one way or another. This degenerate over-simplification has to stop.
They’ve demonstrated over and over that their core principles don’t actually exist, and are simply maxims that they have heard often enough that they blindly parrot them back.
Honestly wild opinions to have. Watch 30 seconds of fox news. A significant chunk of their coverage is about protecting women and children from migrants/pedos/trans people. They want a tough on crime executive branch almost as much as they want low taxes.
Fox News ideology may at times declare opinions that, in complete isolation, might seem reasonable. "Border control", "safe streets", "responsible government" etc. But they approach it from a place of exaggeration and lies, and an outright visceral anger and hatred toward migrants, trans people, etc. They ignore other activities that might be troublesome. Such as ignoring GOP sex offenses, GOP bribery in the oval office, unconstitutional actions by their executive, or needless wars that cost half a trillion dollars and weaken the US' national security.
So I agree with your parent comment, that Fox News and many of its viewers pick and choose what to say they're angry about, either out of intellectual dishonesty or, in the case of the viewer, outright ignorance or deeper thought about the whole picture of the government and society right now.
[0] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/01/the_invisible_t.htm...
> They ignore other activities that might be troublesome. Such as ignoring GOP sex offenses, GOP bribery in the oval office, unconstitutional actions by their executive, or needless wars that cost half a trillion dollars and weaken the US' national security
Conservatives, above all else, assume everyone in government is corrupt and terrible, hence wanting smaller government. That they can't reconcile that with their love of social security is a matter of self preservation, not malice.
But he lacks empathy for groups of people he's never interacted with, and ultimately, if they vote for Donald Trump or his enablers, they either believe a lot of lies told to them by media claiming to be on their side, or they aren't as good of people as they themselves think they are.
Respectfully, my quote and your rebuttal have nothing to do with each other. Nice people can be hypocrites and ignoramuses, which is what one must be to willfully support the GOP in almost any race in the country at this critical time.
edit to add some stories:
---
I'm in Texas.
My relative tried delta 8 and liked it. He doesn't drink alcohol much anymore because of headache and urinary stuff. He took a little and he laughed more, relaxed, and enjoyed some movies. My mom took it for her body aches and she said it helped with pain and made cooking dinner a little more fun.
Now they'd both be felons. I told my relative that they would be felons for having any, and that I too would be one for using this cheap, safe drug. I joked that maybe he could at least vote Dem for Texas Lt. Gov. to kick out the moronic criminal who pushed the new law.
He said "No, I'll never vote Democrat". He talks about trans people being a problem. He's never knowingly met one. He says they should be left alone, but shouldn't in sports or adopt kids.
He has no idea what kinds of laws are being created to wipe trans people from legal existence across the country, and he's fine supporting felons and criminals and people who want me to be in jail for using delta-8. When I told him about one of Trump's proven criminal acts (taking $500 million from the UAE buying stock in his cryptocurrency clearinghouse) he said he didn't believe it. When I talk about Trump's sex trafficking scandals and Epstein, he's silent. When I ask about the Iran war, he's silent.
He would rather his nephew be a felon for a safe and decade-long-legal drug than vote for a Democrat, because of lies and hatred he watches on Fox news from his middle-of-nowhere plot of land where he interacts with about five people a year for the last two decades.
I could go on about how he rants about socialism as he considers using Meals on Wheels, or how his wife got Medicare-funded palliative care for almost no money out of pocket, or any other number of things. But he, living in rural Texas, mentions Mamdani's "communism" for considering opening a few publicly-operated grocery stores in a city of 10 million people.
---
I have to re-iterate: I know many GOP people are good people. I certainly don't hold them to the same individual responsibility for the ongoing coup of the federal government for which I hold the elected politicians. Many are duped by Fox News, and many more are checked out of the daily updates of crimes committed and norms broken. But that's what's happening, and I refuse to acknowledge any merit of an argument for supporting Republicans in elections until the threat from Trumpism is eliminated, the government repaired and patched against the vulnerabilities exploited, and the Democrats screw up royally somehow again.
The great fiction of American politics at this point seems to be the belief that the non-voting population are definitely an election margin who'll definitely come and vote for you provided you support <commentators preferred policy here>.
I don't think anyone here was ever trained on nuance, so how are they going to separate that from political platitudes???
Both parties are against them, owned by oligarchs and mega donors that are actively trying to increase the wealth gap and make average Americans fight each other over the petty dilemma of the week, rather than the real fight of the whole country vs maybe a couple thousand ultra rich douchebags.
The problem is that the media has essentially lost most of its usefulness as a bulwark against the most egregious excesses of crony capitalism and cozied up to it instead. It feels like the Gilded Age again, but the people are somehow more insufferable. Cramming the “light of human consciousness into the stars” apparently requires we create CSAM generating machines powered by nitrogen oxide belching gas turbines. Even the folks at non-profit news outlets like Pro Publica have leadership that refuses to understand that it is difficult to prevent AI errors at scale. Nobody reviews drafts with such detail, we make a lot of assumptions, we trust that the person/machine is not feeding us trash.
This is, of course, doesn’t even bring up the fact that a lot of people in the US now get their news—similar to folks in India via WhatsApp (that became such a problem that Meta was forced to curtail the number of forwards you could do in the app)—by passing trash, hate fueling articles around on social media.
The media, where it isn’t outright compromised, is dying to survive on any revenue stream. local news outlets which are the backbone of solving actual Issues for citizen are not profitable and dying.
We have platforms, which instead incentivize for the largest viewer count, so local content is sacrificed at the altar of the zeitgeist.
It’s a manufactured controversy with only a handful of trans athletes (usually at high school level) in the entire country. It does not make the slightest difference to the lives of the vast, vast majority of voters. If you let it outweigh factors that actually affect your life then you’re a dumb voter.
Is the crucial statement there. Not “it is”.
> It affects women and parents of girls
No it doesn’t. It’s a new boogeyman to demonize that isn’t actually a factor in almost anyone’s lives. Not to mention that the people pushing this issue are proposing things like genital inspections to ensure the boogeyman never arrives:
https://www.newsweek.com/kansas-republicans-pass-bill-genita...
As the parent of a girl I’m a hell of a lot more concerned about that than I am of a trans kid wanting to play sports.
I agree with "seen as" vibes think of the children era being foolish but its what liberal parents are talking about. Mega followers never accepted trans in sport or life so this doesn't change viewpoints.
The "issue" is only an "issue" because some people on Fox News told you it was an "issue." Ask what you're being distracted from.
Suddenly, not wanting trans folks to participate in civilization, Conservatives have gone all in on the transvestigation bullshit that includes genital inspections, accusing conventionally less feminine-looking cis women of being men, etc.
These people are just bigots.
But of course data reuse isn't a sufficiently controversial framing, so a "genital inspection" angle is pushed instead by the author of the article.
For professional or top-tier competitive sports, virtually every sports organization has had rules in place to handle this for decades. The IOC has used testosterone levels as the barometer for fairness since 2003. The entire right-wing apparatus works by feigning ignorance, pretending nobody has ever thought about the fairness of trans folks in sports, all to infuriate easily suggestible rubes. It's beyond absurd.
Not to mention, I don’t even understand how these are substantiated. I clicked through to the source link for some of the results cited and they’re just results tables? What does that “prove” the athlete is trans? Who vets this stuff?
Polling shows that most people across the political spectrum would consider this a reasonable approach.
And then, the Republicans lose most of their attack lines on this topic, and the Democrats don't have to worry as much about having to defend foolish beliefs.
I don't disagree, fundamentally, but the voters are prioritizing minor issues that affect one in a million people over major issues that affect everyone. That's not good judgement, it's stupidity. It's why wedge issues work so well.
And still they refuse to back down on a number of policies that have been proven to be extremely unpopular.
-Independent..
I want to vote for someone who sticks to their plan, who is as honest as possible, who actually cares about Americans instead of saying some catchy phrases and looking good on camera while shaking hands with lobbyists and harmful industries - it's ludicrous!
I agree with the sibling comment that the dems rank lower because their base is made of people who begrudgingly vote for them when the time comes and spend the rest of the time being frustrated that it's our best option.
Most people don't vote based on policies and data. They are naturally skeptical about whether your five-point plans are actually going to have the intended effect. Instead, they vote based on their assessment of your judgment and whether you broadly share their ideas about what "good" and "bad" are.
The only way Obama was objectively radical as a politician and president was the color of his skin.
This is maybe an odd view for an American but it makes sense within a Bangladeshi social context. And democrats are the ones who chose to cultivate an electoral map based on immigrants like my mom in states like Virginia and Michigan.
Sanders is not a member of the party. AOC didn't run for office until Obama had been retired a few years.
Also, it's still insane to expect Obama to police e.g. AOC's language 10 years post-Presidency. That's just an insane expectation. Reality is many voters are crazy.
Its not like it’s totally alien in America. After Biden’s disastrous debate in 2024, Obama was the one who swooped in to lead the party through the chaos. And if Michelle ran for the nomination, she’d probably win. If she had stepped in in 2024 she would’ve won the nomination and the election.
In US politics, that mantle holds until someone else takes the nomination. That role is Biden's. It seems really odd that a former leader other than the most recent would be in charge of the party anywhere. (Remembering here that Biden is still alive and generally capable if suffering age-related decline. Also contextualizing with the fact that the sitting president is also obviously suffering age-related decline.)
> control of the party might pass to Michelle (like happened at least four times in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan).
Yeah, I can see how someone from one of those countries might project onto US politics things that are not commonly done here. Relevant here is Obama beating Hillary for the nomination in 2008.
> After Biden’s disastrous debate in 2024, Obama was the one who swooped in to lead the party through the chaos
I am a political sicko, and I do not remember this happening. Are you perhaps elevating the importance of a single speech Obama gave?
Yes, that was my point. Someone asked me why my mom lumped Obama in with “radicals” and I tried to explain that she probably thinks it’s his job as the most senior man. Biden isn’t because he’s too old and sick. The patriarch is someone like Obama’s age. Gray haired but still vigorous.
Another explanation is that she is misinformed and brainwashed by all the Facebook memes targeted towards boomers. It's not exactly a secret that Meta continues to push right wing propaganda in order to help elect conservative politicians.
> But she left an unstable third world country and viscerally dislikes what’s going on with DSA, immigration, etc.
What does she dislike about DSA, immigration, etc.? What does she think of the rhetoric coming from the Republican party that America doesn't need and want third world immigrants such as herself and her family? And that you should be rounded up, denaturalized, and deported back to Bangladesh (see Laura Loomer's recent comments).
> That said she also hates Trump’s Queens immigrant affect, unpredictability, populism, etc.
I guess it's a rite of passage for all American immigrants to hate on immigrants. "I got mine and I'm the 'correct' type of immigrant. Others are not."
She thought the future would be Bangladeshis acting like British people instead of Bangladeshis acting like Bangladeshis in Britain.
> What does she think of the rhetoric coming from the Republican party that America doesn't need and want third world immigrants such as herself and her family?
She doesn’t want “Little Bangladesh” in Queens to be happening anymore than Trump does. One of the few things she agrees with him on. We came to a red state in 1989 and a county with a Republican congressman who ran unopposed most years, and everything was fine because we were trying very hard to absorb the local culture instead of changing it with our own. Nobody had a problem with Bangladeshi immigrants when it was just a handful of people who left their culture of origin at the door. Americans are extremely tolerant and accommodating people.
I don't quite get this. What acting like Bangladeshis or acting like British people mean? And what does it have to do with DSA?
> She doesn’t want “Little Bangladesh” in Queens to be happening anymore than Trump does. One of the few things she agrees with him on. We came to a red state in 1989 and a county with a Republican congressman who ran unopposed most years, and everything was fine because we were trying very hard to absorb the local culture instead of changing it with our own. Nobody had a problem with Bangladeshi immigrants when it was just a handful of people who left their culture of origin at the door. Americans are extremely tolerant and accommodating people.
So similar to Little Italy or Chinatown and other ethnic places? Why do you have to leave your culture of origin at the door? I thought one of the great things about America was that everyone can celebrate their culture. What local culture did you try to absorb if everyone left it at the door? Or are you specifically talking about white vs other ethnicities? Are you ashamed of your ethnicity and country where your parents immigrated from?
"We are the right kind of people, not the others" Internalized racism is such a weird thing to me.
There's a lot going in Pakistan / India / Bangladesh that's been shaped by the effect of British commerce, manipulation, and rule over a long period.
The Brits imposed a local civil service structure that itself became one of many forms of caste, classism and hierarchy, this one associated with British dress, language, and mannerisms.
You can see similar attitudes in the UK from the now old and historic first waves of post WWII immigrant uncles and aunts, overly formally British in dress and manners and looking down on their own descendants for pushing back on that and adopting other attitudes in dress and speech.
Having the power to ram something more partisan-palatable through and choosing to negotiate with the opposition to find a more mutually-tolerable consensus is the antithesis of radicalism.
You can't really simplify it to such a degree. I believe humans are creatures of action. We like it when things happen. Sometimes, not all the time but sometimes, our morals are downstream of that desire to "be effective". We will align ourselves, no matter the violence we have to do to our own senses, with what is useful.
Specifically, their willingness to skeptically engage with your five-point plan demands that you're actually able to execute it. If you categorically can't make anything happen, then people will cling to an explanation and a morality that can. American democracy has been at a standstill for upwards of 30 years, If the American people have to believe that all their politicians are pedophiles to get some sort of movement again. Then that's what they are going to believe.
So the prediction sounds right? The Republicans have burnt the youth vote pretty badly and have never really recovered.
(See, e.g. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte... and https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls. Annoyingly, the polls don't cleanly break down into generations; Gen X would be the ~44-60 crowd for that election.)
Sure, lots of people were not happy with Bush dragging the country into two wars, but most Republicans remained Republicans, and the angst (based on facts or otherwise) against Obama is what made the Tea Party Movement so big.
(Of course, there was the whole social media thing that became huge around the same time, but the design of social media doesn't favor one side over another...)
They like the way his administration has been terrorizing brown people. Dig in with any of these ~simpletons~ undecided voters and it’s literally that simple.
I despise this current administration. Yet, when I talk to people, I treat them with the same respect as I would my own parents -- don't matter who they are. I have had fun conversations with near toothless factory workers, literal walking stereotype caricatures of MAGA guys, who really aren't bad. They're just trying to live life and keep their lives together yet here's the world, changing all around them. Then this big mouth assures them it will be all right if you vote for him. They get worked up about things like DEI, LGBTQ, foreigners, etc. Sure it sounds stupid but it is what it is, you deal with it using tact. And here I am, born and raised NYC who was a minority at my public high school (may time the only white kid in class), dated the rainbow, and have a lot of experience with a lot of culture. I usually have a hard rock/heavy metal look so I fit in and they feel comfortable. I just tell them fun or funny stories about cultures and all variety of people I knew. These stories help to clear up misconceptions. Like literally the dentally challenged MAGA fellow I mentioned before told me on my way out that he enjoyed my stories and that he learned something new about people. That's the magic -- story telling and gentile nudging of opinions. Rome wasn't built in a day.
I'm actually hopeful in my own way, but the current political environment is being shaped by adult aged children on both sides and it just gets worse. Though they always say, it gets worse before it gets better. Keep nudging that knowledge.
Taxes are good! China, which is run by some of the smartest technocrats in the world, has a very strong system for controlling the flow of foreign products into the country. Because of the nature of their government, they have more tools at their disposal than just tariffs, e.g., requiring foreign companies to establish joint-ventures with Chinese companies. But the purpose is the same.
> a man who could not run casinos successfully
Trump didn't invent tariffs. The political thread in favor of strong tariffs started with Alexander Hamilton: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-pr.... Strong tariffs were a core plank of the Lincoln GOP: https://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/abraham-lincoln-in-....
"Tariff" didn't become a naughty word until the Cato folks took over the GOP in the 1980s.
Add that to the list of things I thought I'd never hear a conservative say.
Say what you will about the man, but Trump's takeover of the mainstream conservertive movement has been thorough, and eerily cordyceps-like.
U.S. elections are a dynamic equilibrium where each party is trying to get to 51%. I live in Annapolis and the WASPs with boats viscerally hate Trump. But they were a core Romney ‘12 demographic.
Rayiner is a bad-faith troll who thinks he is being clever by doing the whole “oh, I thought you wanted to raise taxes, liberal??” thing. He does not actually think taxes are good.
"In Sweden, about 15% of people pay the highest marginal tax rate. If that was the case in the U.S., the top tax bracket would kick in above $120,000 household income. That makes total sense. These people are very well off and should be subsidizing the rest of the country."
I’ve been very consistent in favoring the Nordic tax structure, where you soak the top 40% but have low taxes on the super rich and corporations to prevent capital flight.
Not all taxes are equal. Regressive ones suck.
I'm not a free market fundamentalist. I also don't think we ever had a free market. Implementation details always matter. My standing policy is basically small informed perturbations around free trade, included targeted tariffs. Everything has tradeoffs. Restricting lumber from canada and fucking Americans? Not smart. Letting China openly steal from us? Asymmetric trade policies hurting the US? Also not smart.
The US could theoretically start doing things again, but it is never clear how to make that happen. The people much prefer to get free stuff (who wouldn't!?). Even if you can convince them otherwise, a lot of the institutional knowledge required to do things is gone. As capital moves to where it is most economically useful, the 'free stuff' economic structure has shaped where the capital is found. To move to a 'do things' economy would require turning the capital allocation upside down. To have all the pieces fall into place to see all that align just right requires great upheaval.
Maybe tariffs really are trying to be the catalyst to convince the people that free stuff isn't the way to bring on the revolution, but even if that's the case, that's a different environment to how tariffs were used historically.
Edit- but I would be shocked if the net effect of Trump's tariffs weren't regressive.
Edit 2- " redistribution side can be as progressive as you want, more than offsetting regressive collection if you wish." That's an infinite money glitch if true. Tariffs increase input costs that effect many downstream things, in addition to their direct price effects.
1. Security. You make your own bullets. You're able to make and maintain your own military hardware. When another country cuts supply lines in their own self interest, you have options to advocate for yours, either through trade, making it yourself, or, yes, even force.
2. Economic opportunity for your children and grandchildren. And no, not just "factory jobs" as is commonly sneered, but a community of experience and expertise. An engineer that gets to interact with the products they design in that kind of environment is a better engineer. A country that gets to see and interact with the products it makes has a sense of pride and better social cohesion.
3. Social buy-in and consequences for companies. A Chinese car manufacturer doesn't give a shit if cutting costs killed your grandfather. A local company has to, because the executives and workers are all members of the community. I was in Germany during dieselgate, and the sense of disgust at the company was obvious. They felt that.
These things are, imo, important to the health of any country, but they can only really be valued in retrospect. So yeah, tariffs are a tax, but some things are worth paying for even if what's being purchased isn't necessarily obvious or easy to quantify.
I would guess the optimal course to those ends would include some targeted tariffs. I am damn near certain that the optimal course isn't tariff-centric. Every option in a global economy (or any economy) is coupled and never limited to the first-order obvious effect.
As a very simple example that I see ignored often on here: High paying jobs are good, but increase the cost of the ouput. Consumers are also people, they benefit from lower prices. You can never turn one dial independently. There are pretty magical dials though, like education and trade. Some dials are better than other. All dials treated coarsely are worse than dials treated as the multidimensional optionalities they are.
I generally favor increasing productivity and QoL via net-positive interactions. I default to disliking fixed-pie-slicing until convinced otherwise. With all of the caveats to this position as above.
I mean, I admit that I'm not competitive with people desperate enough to work 12 hour days, 7 days a week, while the grandparents raise the kids in a 10 person household. But I'm probably capable of more sophisticated work due to my education and ability to specialize. Removing all barriers to trade essentially forces companies to offshore and train up nations that may not have your sovereign interests at heart in order to compete and provide a return for investors. It's a short term sugar hit that erodes the nation-state. This is why we strictly limit offshoring for certain strategic industries, but the truth is that all manufacturing industries are strategic to some extent, because they form part of a logistical web.
As for whether or not such a system is sustainable, it's worked for the world's manufacturing powerhouses for decades. The reason they're all falling to China now is because enough of the global supply chain has shifted there that it's now impossible to compete. Assuming those nations don't want to become services-based economies (which has been a disaster for Australia and the UK, neither of which can manufacture a tin of beans), protectionism is the only path forward. And indeed, China is utterly diligent in protecting it's own industries. This isn't fixed-pie-slicing, it's just pragmatic recognition that a government really does want to be able to fix the fighter jets when it needs to, and at some point, that means having enough industry in place to train the guy who does it. And economists, who don't really believe in or care about the problems of nation-states, probably aren't the right people to listen to when that's a concern.
The US is great, don't get me wrong, but the 1950-70s were based on an extremely fortunate combination of circumstances. It was almost certainly an exception rather than a norm to revert to. The resulting economy and middle class and mobility is aspirational, not easily reproducible. And I am certain not by pure protectionism. I mention this because you said repeatability, which I guess I assumed meant of this time that seems most aligned with what you want.
Edit- just re-read and you agree staying global competitiveness is important. Ok, how? I don't see any route there (in manufactured goods) without going hard on automation. I'm guessing (sorry) you basically think automation is bad because manufacturing jobs. Maybe we actually align here though?
I recommend to too many people the book "how the world got rich" https://a.co/d/0ehTVbK4. It's short, it's about what the dominant, generalized correlates with growth are. My insertion is that economic growth is good for everyone and explains without much exaggeration all good societal progress. Just as one concept from here that explains an enormous fraction of global economic dynamics, look up " catch up growth". Sorry if this comes across as you not already knowing about this, I recommend it because I personally found it such a good resource.
(1) This is me inserting a projection, I don't know for sure. I would need a lot of convincing that protectionism and isolationism makes us more competitive overall. I completely understand all of your arguments about skill and knowledge and that other good stuff I already agreed was good. What I don't agree with is that your approach leads to us being to compete in a global market, especially given domestic political reality. It seems your system relies entirely on being able to export. The one thing we do export btw is services, the thing you shit on. And again, I wish we weren't so dominantly service based. I want all the good things you want that come with manufacturing and more domestic self-reliance. I just don't think you can will into existence of a manufacturing dominant prosperous middle class 60s economy that survives global competition, which your export driven plan requires.
Edit- as another aside, I believe economics is increasingly a captured field. So I probably distrust economists on policy at least as much as you, in general. But when they all agree going back a while with data to back it, I weigh it higher. I also feel bad for economists because historically the actual policy they want isn't what makes it through, to the point the preconditions for their policy to work no longer apply. So again this is perhaps something we agree on. But this doesn't invalidate a bias toward free trade is wrong. Implementation matters. See: the parts I agreed on wrt international trade policy what feels like 20 replies ago.
Edit2 - one counter to my position is that with protectionism and manufacturing we can rely more on internal market demand more because we cover more of the market needs, like China is trying to do. Just thinking out loud trying to figure where I'm wrong. A lot of the good times were driven by internal markets. And this at first glance seems more consistent with protectionism. But you want export driven so I'm not sure.
You're focusing on the US, when what I'm saying is historically true for essentially every nation that ever industrialized. Many of those countries are still industrial powerhouses today. The US had a great run from the 50s to the 70s, but it was the world's largest exporter by 1914 thanks to WWI, and didn't relinquish that spot until 2003. Similarly, Japan and Korea didn't have any such luck and still managed to both develop and maintain high living standards even through economic hardship, thanks to their industrial foundations. Taiwan uses its chip industry, again heavily export based, as a shield. China is following the same playbook today, first during China shock 1.0 20 years ago, and now with higher value goods. The only real exceptions to this rule are Singapore and Hong Kong, both of which exploited the fact that they were strategic waypoints in global shipping. Even then, Singapore is one of (if not the) largest oil refiners in the Asia Pacific region, and exports a tremendous quantity of refined petroleum products. Singapore isn't strictly protectionist, but it makes heavy use of cheap Asian laborers who will never, ever be citizens, and it engaged in massive skills transfers from other nations during the 80s and 90s (my own family was part of that wave). And of course, the major European powers all built themselves on the back of protectionism and exports. The erosion of that directly resulted in the crises we see today.
I have no issue with automation, and I agree that investors and business will always want to exploit cheaper economic conditions elsewhere. What I'm saying is that any government that wants to preserve living standards and maintain an industrial base needs to have the backbone to tell those interests "No". They are part of the social fabric of a country, and the backbone of it's defense. Investors will make less money, but I don't see that as a bad thing. They would actually have to allocate money more effectively within a country to turn a profit.
I'm not shitting on services, they're necessary. But services can't manufacture bullets when you need them, and countries always need them eventually. Not to mention, we live in a time when even services being offshored, so what's left? We build houses and make coffees for one another, while banks and mega corporations that are beholden to no border lord over us?
For what it's worth, I agree with you that economics is a captured discipline, and I applaud your devotion to testing your own ideas. But the stuff I'm pointing out isn't economics, it's history -- things that actually happened. In my opinion (and it is just that) any economic theory that is at odds with history is straight up garbage.
So there will be no build out of manufacturing capacity. You’d be a fool to spend tens of millions on that when at literally any moment the market will revert back to the norm.
This administration’s policy making is insane. I’m surprised folks are still trying to sanewash it.
Half of these (or at least, instances of these) happened in the past week or two; most of the rest have happened in the past 2-3 months. I'm not even being exhaustive. You could
"Everything" is an understandable shorthand in this case and while technically hyperbolic it's really understood that it really means "most things that matter on a domestic and foreign policy stage."
In any other normal sane world stuff would get called out, greyed out, and ultimately shot down. In THIS world, the responses (I bet, like this one) are the "greys."
It's a scary world we live in where the Left turns into the Right of the past.
Do you have evidence for this?
I think you’re giving him too much credit. He is just a mouthpiece for various people, he can’t make a plan and stick with it, and never has.
Here is an article from the newyorkfed with an excerpt which isn't in line with what you are claiming. And it is quite likely that even those that didn't raise prices initially, aren't going to keep absorbing those costs forever (no such thing as free-lunch), these studies were done only 3 months into the tarriffs.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/06/are-bu...
"Consistent with textbook economics, tariffs generally resulted in higher prices to customers. Indeed, roughly half of businesses reported raising prices of goods directly subject to tariffs. Interestingly, a significant share of businesses also reported raising the selling prices of their goods and services unaffected by tariffs. Many businesses indicated they increased prices to cover other rising costs such as wages and insurance, though it is possible that in some cases, businesses were taking advantage of an escalating pricing environment to increase prices. For example, something similar happened in 2018-19 as firms increased their prices on dryers when tariffs rose on washing machines from China, even though dryers were not subject to tariffs."
Ever visit Alibaba and learn that the importers are still paying $1200 for 12 washing machines and then reselling it to you with a Maytag logo on it for $1200 EACH?
Pack it in everybody! This guy thinks they worked as intended, that’s all the evidence needed! Case closed!
Ignore the way everything is more expensive. Ignore the way everything on digikey has a dedicated tariff column. Ignore the general chaos and the rest of what your lying eyes see, a hackernews throwaway account is pretty sure that the new tax on imports is unrelated to imports being more expensive.
You don't have to take my word for it though! I don't even know why you're trying to make this argument when you can just go look through a grocery store and see how much more expensive food is now than just a few years ago.
Argentina and Brazil should be a warning example to everyone. The paper Argentina Paradox by Taylor gives good insights into how trade barriers played a fundamental role in hurting this once very prosperous economy.
I think the overall direction of your comment is somewhat correct, but you're really overstating the claim here. There are very few things in general that could be called an unmitigated disaster (Is the challenger? Is the hindenburg? I'm not even sure about those...), so claiming that _everything_ the current admin does is an unmitigated disaster is just too extreme. Your criticism would be more believable if it was more realistic.