The sport who's leader shoved his head so far up Trump's ass he was able to taste his orange make-up. All for the sake of giving him a farce of a "peace" prize.
(I'm talking about FIFA in case you are not aware)
You argued it's good for the US to shrink out export markets so goods will be cheaper at home, and that Trump is doing 4d chess. I guess at least now you are being honest and just doing straight snark like a true Trump sycophant.
What are you talking about. Trumps US-EU trade deal has been halted, and a response to Trumps 1th. feb tariffs is being drawn up right now. EU not doing anything in your head, try following the news.
That's true for all governments who issue treasuries. For the US it's the kindness of the Japanese, the Chinese and the British. But mostly their own kindness.
Note that lots of the Treasury holdings are mostly hedge fund related, so it's not as clear who holds the longer-term paper (hopefully someone who knows more than me will jump in at this point and provide data).
They are either being paid, or they are so lost in propaganda that they're willing to do it >for free. They have more time that they are willing to waste on propaganda than you, unless you decide to dedicate every waking moment to a rebuttable you are behind the eight ball. Even then, they're probably in dozens of communities and threads at the same time, repeating the same garbage.
The only way this sort of rhetoric can be fought is at the level of moderation. This site has user-driven moderation, which in theory means that you can fight the tide this way, but in practice the authoritarians and fascists have access to these tools as well, and bad faith use is rarely punished, so these tools are less of a panacea and more of a race to who can down-vote who first.
The only other alternative is for the paid moderation of this site to put their foot down and say "We are not okay with fascists and authoritarian apologists on our site" and ban them. The admins of Hacker News are another on a very long list of social media site hosts who have decided to wash their hands of the responsibility. They don't care.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If you decide you still want to engage, I recommend viewing the interaction through the lens of an attention economy; spend less time on a rebuttle than they did on their post, and only in places where you think it will actually be seen.
Correct, it's literally their main job to spew propaganda. As demonstrated repeatedly by power outages in st. petersburg, moscow and most recently iran.
Unless one verifies every single user by ID, there needs to be at least a platform-level detection of user jurisdiction and the application of appropriate penalties and limits to their activity.
You don't have to go that far, there's a lot easier solution - prefer socializing in spaces that actually vet their users to some degree and have humans who have an active hand in moderation.
It's the old way that social spaces on the internet used to work, and you don't need ID verification for that, you just need spaces that are conducive to that style of community-building. Think Discord, not Instagram. Think (invite-only) Mastodon, not Twitter. Think lobsters, not HN. Think Tildes, not Reddit.
> They have more time that they are willing to waste on propaganda than you
Yes, that's why I need others to help. There are actually less of them (bots) than us. There is one pretty strange "tiktok-like" site, that has the worst kind of people and memes out there showing up regularly, something like 4chan but for images, but somehow most trolls (there are trolls from many different groups operating there) still can't hold on and every such trolling post is pretty fast met with a big wave of downvotes and counter-comments.
> The only other alternative is for the paid moderation of this site to put their foot down and say "We are not okay with fascists and authoritarian apologists on our site" and ban them
The owners of that site can't manage such a big firehose of hate and most users say that they are racist degenerates (and they say they don't care if you are black or white racist, if you are racist they like you).
> The admins of Hacker News are another on a very long list of social media site hosts who have decided to wash their hands of the responsibility. They don't care.
They DO care and a lot of users here also care. Every stupid comment that I've seen could be from troll was very quickly downvoted and counter-commented. We didn't see a lot of them, because they are deleted pretty fast and often and trolls just can't get easy foothold here.
You are not going to change somebody's opinion if they submit to Twitter discourse. Not even getting screwed personally would change their opinion. Hard right wingers at any time in history learn in only one way.
Hard right wingers are a small minority. There also exist people that can change their opinion. If you don't engage with hard right wingers, a lot of people won't see ant counter-arguments and will be convinced that hard-right way is the majority view, is the right way, and will flock to that way of thinking. Engaging with right wingers on public forum is necessary, so that their voice is not the only one heard.
We're all underestimating the sheer number of people in russia who have a "career" in a while-collar job in some propaganda unit. It's a good way to work at the army but not having to actually fight at the front.
They pose as citizens of European, African, Asian or American countries online and try to steer discussion to subvert the local society. The Twitter location reveal showcases that it has an immense scale.
There are many examples such as Scottish independence movement going offline when iran goes offline.
On websites like HN and reddit you cannot even see where someone is originating from. But you can ALWAYS detect them by the cognitive biases they're using to drive their propaganda: false equivalency biase, false choice dilemmas, and so on.
> We're all underestimating the sheer number of people in russia who have a "career" in a while-collar job in some propaganda unit.
Yes, and there are more Russians than Ukrainians, yet somehow they can't overcome a smaller country in 4 years. Trolls want you to give up in countering them. Their work is about pushing propaganda AND demoralising people so that they give up fighting. When you think "why bother", they won.
Military recruitment ads seem perplexingly resistant to the trends of increasing diversity in advertising. And the minorities one might assume to feel slighted by the oversight, are noticeably silent about it.
"We'll see how long the US economy is going to last when it can't even fund its own government."
This is fantasy thinking, projection of a subjective wish.
The dollar is the global reserve currency and is under no serious threat to be displaced (and no, the dollar dropping back to where it was a couple of years ago vs the Euro, is not a meaningful event).
The US economy is by far the world's largest and now dwarfs the Eurozone.
To answer your question: the US economy is going to last a very long time yet. So far it has lasted hundreds of years. Please provide a comparison to any other economy that has lasted so long and done so well. You'll be able to name two or three examples maximum.
In the moment people tend to get hyper emotional, hyperbolic. They think something fundamental is changing. That's almost always nothing more than personal subjective projection of what they want to have happen, rather than an objective assessment of reality. Back in reality the US has survived and thrived through drastically worse than anything going on in the present. The Vietnam era was far worse both socially/culturally and economically. WW2 was drastically worse. The Civil War was drastically worse. The Great Depression was drastically worse. But oh yeah sure, the US superpower is about to end any day now.
Europe survived 2 devastating home wars in the last 100 years, a lot of it was under Soviet occupation, and has smaller natural deposits. The US economy is being propped-up by cheap credit and blitzscaling of tech, and the money is running out. Those companies have to start making money, and the european market is critical to that. The rest of the US market is stagnant at best. The US consumer market is being held up by the top 10% of spenders. The real US economy is disconnected from the stock market and GDP. The average US consumer is weak, and the US is not going to last a trade war with EU and China. Meanwhile the EU signing trade deals.
Those who died weren't still there after the war. Those of them who didn't have any children left behind were effectively genetically exterminated - ending millions of years of their genetic heritage. And cultural heritage.
It was the greatest disasters in the history of Europe, and the effects are still deeply felt. The world wars were the greatest idiocy in the history of humanity.
The European land mass is of course there. The European people(s) have been significantly altered from what they were and what they would have been if it wasn't for those wars.
The problem is deeper than economics. It’s the festering wound of reconstruction turning putrid. It doesn’t have to be the end of the US, but it certainly can be.
Also, I’m not sure the US economy was even great for most of the periods you mentioned. The question of if the US survives to have the same economic standing that it did in the 1800s is not that compelling
> The US economy is by far the world's largest and now dwarfs the Eurozone.
Nominal, Eurozone, yes.
But, being the reserve currency boosts the exchange rate all by itself. I'd argue that this acts as hysteresis, that it adds strength that keeps it a reserve currency longer than it would if there was no memory in the system. Therefore, if anything does induce a shock, the PPP rate is more relevant when considering who might displace it; this other currency (or currencies) would then also get the same hysteresis benefit.
The EU, PPP, is about the same as the US (30 T), and I'd argue that "the EU" is important measure for near-future stuff rather than the current Eurozone, because the EU has the no-specific-time-constraint preference to become all Eurozone… except for the bits that opted out. But also some more neighbours who opted in without being in the EU. It's weird.
China, PPP, it is bigger than the US, 40 T by PPP. Not quite as big as the gap between the US and India, but close enough I had to get the calculator out I can't eyeball the ratio on a linear graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/jfgbd60rb...
> To answer your question: the US economy is going to last a very long time yet. So far it has lasted hundreds of years. Please provide a comparison to any other economy that has lasted so long and done so well. You'll be able to name two or three examples maximum.
You didn't do well for all of those hundreds of years, if you squint hard enough to ignore the great depression you get to about 150 years, which basically means about the same as every other industrial economy that didn't have a war in the middle split it apart. If you don't do that (because the great depression really sucked), the half of Europe whose national boundaries explosively reorganised, and also the Soviet Union, wave hello.
The USSR is an important reference, because basically nobody saw the collapse coming until a year or two before it happened. It was unthinkable.
> In the moment people tend to get hyper emotional, hyperbolic. They think something fundamental is changing. That's almost always nothing more than personal subjective projection of what they want to have happen, rather than an objective assessment of reality.
All true.
> Back in reality the US has survived and thrived through drastically worse than anything going on in the present. The Vietnam era was far worse both socially/culturally and economically. WW2 was drastically worse. The Civil War was drastically worse. The Great Depression was drastically worse. But oh yeah sure, the US superpower is about to end any day now.
How many of those occasions did the US refuse to rule out military force with its primary set of allies in order to seize land supposedly to keep it safe from a nation that's now 33% richer than it is? The Civil War was not a time when y'all were a big player on the world stage, it was when Europe was busy carving everything up into colonies.
The US economy is currently to overwhelming extent a bunch of tech companies betting hard on that AI will revolutionize everything. With huge circular economy. Once that bubble bursts, you'll see where you really stand
What is not fundamental about the end of NATO? What is not fundamental about the US actively working to give up its role as global hegemon? The US may survive but that doesn't mean it's not fundamental.
I swear you yanks playing down every single thing that Trump does, as if history has ended, are insane.
The USA will reap what it is currently sowing and it frankly will deserve it.
Had Merkel not opened the border in 2015, Germany would be far worse off. If you ever set foot into a German retirement home, hospital, restaurant, random shop at the central station, cinema, xmas market, you name it, you realize that all those immigrants are currently carrying the economy.
She should get a prize for this instead of being blamed. Even if you don't care about the moral aspect of helping refugees.
In Germany, 23% of the people in working age, don't work [1]. The "refugees are carrying the economy", because you are effectively paying 23% of the local working age population (I'm here assuming you aren't paying refugees to go there and not work, right?) to slack. Remove their benefits and see how quickly you don't need to import people to do those jobs.
And no, I don't care about the "moral aspect" of not "helping refugees". If you care, you welcome them into your own place.
Also, notice how you didn't go into the gas deals Merkel did with Russia and forced upon the rest of the EU.
You can't just give any random job to any random person. Go out on the street, talk to the first homeless person and then tell me that for your mom's hip replacement surgery next week for which a Syrian doctor is scheduled, you rather see that person scheduled. And the rehab for which an Afghan immigrant is scheduled, you would prefer the homeless' friend next to him, smelling of Jägermeister. After you did that, we talk again.
