This is what happens when you forget that stupid people are a danger to themselves and everyone around them. >>>
Stock Rout Picks Up Steam With Recession Warnings Blaring
www.bloomberg.com/news/article…— The Editorial Board (@editorialboard.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 12:03 PM
What’s the mandated boilerplate? Past performance is no guarantee of future returns?
Markets are plunging bc Trump said we might have a recession. Excellent example of how what happens on Wall St is often stupid. Don’t they have their own analyses? Aren’t Trump/Musk’s actions sufficient? How does Trump essentially shrugging his shoulders make anything different from what it was Fri?
— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 4:33 PM
This probably explains the “why now” part of my question
bsky.app/profile/pkru…— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 6:33 PM
Market down. Twitter down. Recession talk up.
— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 10:12 AM
Republicans inherited one of the strongest stock markets in history and in 1 month they've fucked it all up.
— DCCC (@electdemocrats.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 12:13 PM
*banging fork and knife on table* STONKS STONKS STONKS STONKS
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Tesla at 222!
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 3:00 PM
Trump going on Fox News to admit he can't rule out a recession really underscores the dynamic I tried to identify in this piece/thread:
— Greg Sargent (@gregsargent.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 6:54 AM
He’s Number One!
Welp!
Harris,Biden,Obamas,Clintons and so many others tried to tell you over and over, day after day but NO price of eggs,a trans athlete overt racism and misogyny won. Say that loud and clear. This is not about how we talk to the white working class. This is about honesty.— Kriss C. (@krissclemens.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 9:58 AM
Urza
Bet it looks alot like that in many other nations for the poll at the end.
schrodingers_cat
Biden gave us a full employment economy with low inflation and we forced him to retire.
Phein64
Financial ruin is all Trump is capable of, all that he has ever done on his own. I moved all my retirement funds in TSP (the Federal employees 401K) into the G Fund in mid-December, before he had a chance to send things south. Had I stayed in the S&P 500 index fund, I would be down close to $30K. It’s not optimal, but the G Fund is paying 4.625% right now, and that’s probably only going to go up.
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat: Truth. And fuck the Vichy Times and everyone who contributed to that.
Money Honey is looking kinda orange and fakey there. Not to be ageist, but she is looking old, and aghast.
New Deal democrat
My guess is we touch a 10% correction from the peak at about 9:32 tomorrow morning, and that will trigger some powerful “buy” programs.
But as you write in the post, this is triggered by fundamentals. If there is no Rule of Law, but just a mad king, how can you enter into any business deal with confidence that the rug won’t be pulled out from under you?
Also, Wall Street was laser focused on their tax cuts, but they neglected to figure in to their analyses that the US might become a pariah state, boycotted by foreign businesses and tourists alike. Ooops!
TBone
I traveled the Internet early this morning and my 6:20am comment said strap in and buckle up. Saw some writers explaining why The Dollar’s hegemony is detested by Dotard & admin. as well why they DGAF about the markets.
I’m still involuntarily in for the long haul (I hope).
Pooty is doing “great works”…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=84niZwqbYjY
bbleh
@schrodingers_cat: Joe’s Excellent Economy will stand as a lesson for the ages.
That the Orange Fool and his flying monkeys have managed to fk it up is certainly no surprise — not doing so WOULD have been — but for sure it ain’t just ’cause he admitted a recession is possible. At most, that may have convinced the fund managers that the pretense couldn’t be maintained any longer and it was time to bail.
We’re in for a rough time. And it’s gonna hit MAGA-land worst (genuinely sorry, WV!). Remains to be seen just how durable support for him will be when things really start to bite.
scav
oh dear. is there no such thing as alternative gravity? has the magic sharpie go boom?
Steve LaBonne
@New Deal democrat: Our business “elites” are a bunch of fucking morons. They have ALWAYS made a lot more money under Democratic Administrations, but they are myopically fixated on their taxes.
Jay
@schrodingers_cat:
At least he can afford to retire. He earned that. I hope he gets a lot of time for bike riding, dog walking and good weather for cruisin’ with the top down
Scout211
Apparently that Fox News poll with Trump as the greatest threat to world peace was a German poll from 2019. It went viral last month as a current poll but was quickly fact-checked by many different news fact-checkers.
I really wanted it to be true now though.
satby
Krugman: What’s remarkable is that there’s hardly any real news driving this. It’s just investors belatedly realizing that Trump is who he is, and always was.
satby: Jump you fuckers
Glory b
@Elizabelle: She started her Trump interview by saying, “First, we all know you inherited a giant mess from Joe Biden…”.
sanjeevs
@Steve LaBonne: You would think hedge fund managers would understand that minority investors tend not to do well in countries without an strong judiciary or a corrupt executive.
jowriter
@schrodingers_cat: I will never not be angry about this. It’s like Hillary and 2016. We have to move forward but it is what it is.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
Don’t forget oppression of labor.
And for white labor, oppression of non-white labor.
A Ghost to Most
We’re thankful (so far) that Fidelity is dealing with our 401k, so we don’t have to. We’re getting too old for this shit.
rebelsdad
I’m old poor. I have nothing in retirement and about $12 in my bank account. I’ve always expected to work until I drop dead so this doesn’t faze me.
Martin
My experience has been that the typical market investor – which includes a lot of large fund mangers – aren’t any smarter than Musk and Trump. There is a collective wisdom in the market, but it takes a LONG time to average out, like years.
I would also argue that the economy was good in federal reserve terms, but not in others. Income inequality is outrageously bad. Housing costs are unnecessarily high. The economy is really, really badly tilted away from labor and toward rent seeking. Those aren’t small problems that can be papered over by GDP numbers and Democrats shouldn’t hand wave these problems away.
Suzanne
@satby:
The stock market has always been too vibe-y for me. It makes as much sense to me as celebrity gossip, which is to say: very little.
So I’ve historically put my stuff in target date funds and endeavor not to check it, because I’m to smart enough. But now I’m wondering if leaving it alone is a good strategy.
schrodingers_cat
@jowriter: He was not good enough for many white people even on our side. And yet we have these daily debates about fucking Democratic messaging and Sanders is giving speeches in Iowa. And a doddering old man sits in the WH. But Joe Fucking Biden was too old for the likes of Ezra Klein and other Vichy Times writers.
Jay
On the bright side, the “Inauguration Billionaires Boy’s Club” have collectively lost $209 billion since Jan 6th.
Glory b
@schrodingers_cat: I will be angry about that for a LONG TIME.
A historic act of shooting oneself in the foot.
I wanted to cry when he made the announcement, saying that he loved his job but he loved his country more.
And look at what America did.
Fair Economist
Of course, Fox figures telling their viewer the Trump economy is weakening isn’t going to help the economy. I wonder if a good old-fashioned panic or balance of payments crisis is possible?
Gin & Tonic
Good thing I don’t need that money for now.
TBone
@Fair Economist: possible or probable …
rebelsdad
@Martin: there is something seriously wrong with an economy where a single, middle-aged man with a college degree has a professional job and can’t even afford his own apartment in a medium cost of living area. Disillusioned doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel.
Baud
The sad thing is that if Trump, after he won, had done nothing else but say “I’ve been vindicated, I forgive everyone, and I’m going to golf for four years and do nothing else,” he’d be at 80% approval and the US and the world would be in a better place.
zhena gogolia
@Steve LaBonne: I know. I’m a total ignoramus about money, but I could figure that one out.
Elizabelle
@Glory b: Oh fuck her. She is an imbecile, but a telegenic one.
Albeit. Not in that photo.
@Jay: They have farther to fall, though.
Suzanne
@Martin:
FWIW (not much), I agree with you.
Raoul Paste
In a perfect world, the Twitter malfunction would have been caused by Anonymous. But that’s just a crazy hope in a chaotic world. I suppose I’ve seen too many movies.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: But that wouldn’t satisfy his patron. And I don’t mean Musk.
geg6
@schrodingers_cat:
Tell it.
Elizabelle
@Martin: Joe Biden and the Biden administration did the very best that they could.
He — or at least Democrats — could have done a lot more with a second term.
But: egg prices!
I fucking hate the fucking media. I hope a lot of them get canned. They need to feel pain from the idiocy they unleashed on us.
Baud
The one thing I’ll give Trump credit for is asking people for patience. We’re in this mess because people never gave Dems any.
Martin
@satby: Except that there is real news driving this. Foreign consumers are rejecting US goods. That’s fucking huge. Foreign governments are now more inclined to block US goods than Trump is to tariff them and stick to his promise. That’s pretty huge. So far Michigan and NY are only facing 25% tariffs on power exported to the US and not a shutoff. Germany is considering canceling their F-35 order, in the shadow of their commitment to increased defense spending. All of that had news in the last 24 hours.
zhena gogolia
@Raoul Paste: Anonymous is not on that side.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Oh I know. And he can’t do it even in his own. But that’s what’s sad about the situation.
Elizabelle
@Baud: But. Trump sold the US presidency to Musk and Putin.
It’s probably his biggest deal, and he cannot even brag about it.
hells littlest angel
Yeah, the stock market is not the economy. It is a leading fucking indicator, though, isn’t it?
I love that Krasnov shrugs off a recession, then follows up by shrugging off a government shutdown. There will always be enough money to fly him on Air Force One to a golf course, so why the fuck is any of this his problem?
I’m not saying people should murder the entire Krasnov clan — I’m just saying I would understand.
MagdaInBlack
@rebelsdad: Similar situation here.
Jay
Keep in mind, that a minimum of 92% of stock and other trading is Algorithmic trading. Basically using a variety of different strategies, computers do the trades, so the stock market is not “sane” it’s the Terminator.
Baud
@hells littlest angel:
I think the only time the stock market going down is good for the economy is if it does down because people are earning higher wages.
laura
No one could have predicted…\\
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
There’s some new group. Can’t remember the name.
scav
@hells littlest angel: A Super fucking Eight Ball could be a leading indicator of the economy if enough MBAs, media opiners and their audience really really believed it.
trnc
@Baud: Golf doesn’t satisfy psychotic urges.
sentient ai from the future
@TBone: last night i did a little reading (wikipedia) on jay carney and he is exactly the sort of person you do not want to fuck with in a trade war. canada will own 70% of the US by the time the shitbird’s term is over, and honestly that’s just fine by me. he also has a background in and his spouse is also involved in doing way-upstream economic-development-as-social-justice work.
we’d all be better off, i think, if we started a war with canada, and then immediately surrendered and let them sort out the situation here.
JoyceH
It amuses me to see Trump say there might be some mild and short-lived disruption in the economy. In the back of my mind, I hear him saying, re COVID, ‘one day it will go away, like a miracle it will just go away.’
BTW, what’s up with his yellow ties? He doesn’t/didn’t always wear a red tie, but it was his usual go-to. These days, it seems like the yellow tie is on a par with the red one. Ask our media to investigate – WHAT does it MEAN?
Baud
@trnc:
Sure, I mean, it’s not curling.
JoyceH
@sentient ai from the future:
That was the plot of The Mouse That Roared. Tiny country declared war on the US, expecting to quickly lose and get all rebuilt like the combatants in WWII. By a strange twist of fate, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick winds up WINNING the war. Hilarity, of course, ensues.
Martin
@Elizabelle: Truthfully, they didn’t. I still credit Harris’ loss to her pivot off of economic populism, which was the driver at the start of her campaign, out there with labor leaders, etc. and gave her a 7 point polling lead, and somewhere Sept/Oct (I was dealing with a family emergency for a few weeks in there) that all went away, with the reporting being that the billionaires demanded she cut that out in exchange for continued large dollar donations. That’s when she hit the road with Liz Cheney and that’s when her polling lead started to evaporate.
And while I appreciate Biden’s student debt efforts, there was nothing (even rhetorically) on housing which is much more important and would have been more broadly felt.
Democrats more broadly need to figure out how to cut off the corporate support before the GOP figures that out. Young Republicans are more anti-corporate than Democrats are. Guys like Vance are more open fans of Lina Khan than most Democrats are.
Old School
@Martin:
Yes, but could Democrats be allowed to take credit for the things that were good?
Jay
@zhena gogolia:
@Baud:
Dark Storm Team, they have been around for while.
sentient ai from the future
@hells littlest angel: it’s a leading indicator in the sense that degenerate gamblers having enough spare wealth to wager on stonks is an indication that theres excess liquidity to throw around.
i think the leading-er indicator (because you start getting into the REAL degenerate gamblers, with putative commodities untethered to any real world activity) is the cryptocurrency market.
that has also been eating shit for the last couple weeks and i am fucking HERE FOR IT.
YY_Sima Qian
@New Deal democrat: Here is Van Jackson’s take on the dynamic you are talking about at the end, from an IR perspective:
Raoul Paste
@JoyceH: I remembered that too
rebelsdad
@YY_Sima Qian: paywall
VFX Lurker
This. Only one party gives a darn about responsible governing, but privileged American voters put the arsonist party into power.
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: The problem with perceptions of the economy is that there’s a Hack Gap. Democrats know that even when the economy is “good” in top-line terms, there are deep structural inequities that make people suffer, and Democratic leadership hasn’t done much to erase that. Republicans only know that the economy is good when the President is a Republican and bad when the President is a Democrat. The result is that Democrats will never, ever catch a break.
sentient ai from the future
@JoyceH:
classic peter sellers that i should have seen by now. i remember we had a betamax tape with that on it, taped from broadcast, but i never actually watched it.
i also would like to rewatch wag the dog, which i only saw once and was overly distracted during viewing.
are there enough films with the common thread of “fake war” like this to have a medium cool about it?
TF79
To some extent, the real news was Trump yelling “1, 2, 3, 4 I declare a Trade War!” a while back, and the mystery then was why the stock market hardly flinched. This is just the “holy shit he means it” lag to that real news
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Dems will never complete a 10 year project in 2 years. So regular folks will have to suffer in perpetuity, because they can’t be made to believe in anything except right wing status symbols.
HinTN
@Jay: Bring.It.On
Elizabelle
@Martin: Well, thank gawd that they are not in office any more.
Since they can’t do a fucking thing right, right?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
Why do people keep bringing this shit up? MisterMix did the same thing in a recent post. So fucking what if she campaigned with Liz Cheney a few times or a handful of appearances or whatever?
Somebody in a thread within the last week brought up the fact that successful resistance movements to autocracies are made up of a diverse coalition of people who only agree on opposing the autocrat
This is such a stupid criticism of Harris
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Yep, anyone who ran away because of that is part of the problem.
MagdaInBlack
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I agree.
Jim Appleton
Ruining our economy is the secret plan hinted at before the election.
No one, especially the rapist browns, will want to immigrate.
zhena gogolia
@Elizabelle: I know. So tired of this.
zhena gogolia
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I agree.
Professor Bigfoot
@Jim Appleton: Deshaun Watson is already a US citizen.
Hoodie
@Martin: I went to a presentation the other day about Lafayette’s visit to America on the 50th anniversary of the revolution. One of the stories involved a trip to NC to visit with some old war comrades. One of them was injured in a carriage accident (Lafayette’s assistant said the NC roads were terrible). The Americans wanted to bleed the victim but the French interceded to prevent them from killing the man. Trump’s prescriptions for the economy are the functional equivalent of bloodletting. BTW Lafayette apparently was not impressed by NC, he thought slavery was holding it back.
YY_Sima Qian
Here is Van Jackson’s take no the US’ economic prospect. As he is an IR scholar, I would not necessarily take his word on macro-economic prognosis. (For example, I find the the analysis of the PRC political economy that he incorporates in his analysis of geopolitics, & I agree w/ a lot of the latter, to be thoroughly conventional & out of date, heavily influenced by the likes of Michael Pettis.) I don’t know if the US is headed for a Great Depression 2.0 or “just” a bad recession. What I find notable is his analysis of why the kleptocrats associated w/ MAGA may want to engineer that very outcome, & why the plutocrats may grumble but ultimately go along. Posted below in full (emphasis mine):
Fair Economist
@satby:
LOL. Indeed!
David Collier-Brown
@Phein64: Switch to something that will do well as the world reserve currency becomes the Euro
Wilson Heath
Trump take nest egg.
Princess
@Martin: Lots of Canadians (but not yet the government) are talking about cancelling its F-35 order too. Canada needs the planes but it turns out the US is willing and able to make them unusable after the sale if it feels like. So maybe not a great investment.
TS
The markets are stuffed when a single person can send them up/down with a single word or action. I think about insider trading & with doge dismantling any controls, that will be working overtime for the next many years.
Elizabelle
@zhena gogolia: I think I am just going to have to do something else tonight.
I know that, during the Biden administration, I did not wake up every single morning with an uneasy feeling of “what is he/it going to do today?”
Having Elon Musk tear the government to shreds is just insane.
Have to say, it may be that this wrecking crew teaches the dumbest (and they are incredibly fucking dumb) American voters what government was doing right all along, and why it handles functions that the spectacular “free” market cannot.
But we did not have to go through all of this loss.
Elizabelle
Honest to god, the idea of Trump or Musk going under a guillotine makes me smile. They earned it.
Fair Economist
@TF79:
Just like Wile E. Coyote – as many predicted.
I thought the recession wouldn’t kick in until next January, when the federal budget changes had kicked in and Christmas feel-good was over. Trump is remarkably good at wrecking things.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
@MagdaInBlack:
@zhena gogolia:
And I want to make it clear I agree that we need to rely less on big donors and that corporations/the rich need to be reined in. And I think dumbass political consultants that advised for example that Walz needed to find areas of agreement with JD Vance during the VP debate need to be jettisoned. I think these same consultants are advising the Dems to move right and throw trans people under the bus too
But the whole Liz Cheney thing is like a meme at this point. Every critic repeats it
Phein64
@David Collier-Brown: What would that be? I’ll be game to move after December 31st, 2025.
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Memes replace thought.
Martin
@Old School: Sure, if they are willing to be honest about the overall situation. You don’t get credit for putting the dishes away when you also forgot to pick your kid up from school. And I see a lot of Democrats demanding that we not point out the remaining problems.
And you can’t blame voters for rejecting candidates that won’t acknowledge the problems they see.
Hoodie
@Princess: I’m sure the major defense contractors are getting very uncomfortable with that. When I worked on engineering for the F16 radar foreign sales were a big profit center. The Gulf states and Israel won’t make up the difference .
TBone
@sentient ai from the future: do they get to depose this admin and install a sane government? If so, I’m in.
(WuTang posted Carney’s resume which I saw this morning.)
catclub
Maybe they will fuck up the debt ceiling extension.
T-Bills not convertible? Could be a problem.
jowriter
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Thank you.
Doc Sardonic
@Professor Bigfoot: Well played…..
Fair Economist
@Baud:
Yeah, he was really handed a golden ticket. He could have made a big show about immigration without doing enough to mess up the economy, and given his billionaire buddies another round of tax cuts, and then claimed credit for the good things coming out of Biden’s reforms. It was a disturbingly smooth path to Orbanization. But he had to be a monster. Definitely bad in the short run – I’m not sure whether it will be bad in the long run, because it gives us one more chance to stop the plutocrats.
Gin & Tonic
@sentient ai from the future: His name is Mark.
schrodingers_cat
There are two main parties, if you continuously dump on one for not being perfect, you are helping the other party. Yes lesser evil is preferable to outright evil
Have people noticed how age as an issue has all but vanished from the elite media
Also it hasn’t escaped my notice that most of the self anointed tribunes of the working class constantly dumping on the Dems are wealthy white (and white adjacent) bros.
mrmoshpotato
As I said downstairs –
Holy shit, Batman!
Well done on the stock market plunge to Putin’s bitch and the South African Nazi shitstain who no one voted for!
Elizabelle
@Fair Economist:
I do wonder if that will be the silver lining.
Although a lot of us will be living in our cars by that time. Can you have a nation doing that? To find out.
sab
@New Deal democrat: Mark Cuban said that during the campaign, that tax cuts aren’t much use if the economy and your income plummet under incompetent governance.
different-church-lady
@Glory b: ”…and we’ve made it messier.”
different-church-lady
@Baud: But then he wouldn’t be Trump.
mrmoshpotato
What part are we on in this completely predictable series with pile of shit Republican parts?
different-church-lady
Think about how cheap eggs will be WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE A FREAKIN’ JOB ANYMORE, YOU DUMBSHITS!
different-church-lady
@mrmoshpotato: All of them, Katie.
sentient ai from the future
@David Collier-Brown:
@Phein64:
canadian pm-elect mark carney, who has also spent time as the first non-UK head of the Bank of England (and warned about brexit) has been saying for some time, per wikipedia, that the world should move off the USD as a reserve currency and onto a sort of synthetic interbank thing that sounds a bit like cryptocurrency (so i have kneejerk reactions there) but i’d imagine would have a lot more safeguards. and the euro itself is kind of like this to begin with so seems like an easier starting point.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
different-church-lady
@sentient ai from the future:
Well, that’ll save the South Koreans some trouble.
AxelFoley
@schrodingers_cat:
Period. Full stop.
Jay
@Princess:
The French Rafale met all the requirements, plus an offered coproduction agreement. Best of all, it’s all French and the US can’t turn it off. It even has greater range an a better LEO weapons load.
different-church-lady
@trnc: Sure, but neither does anything else.
sab
@sentient ai from the future: Jay Carney is an American former journalist. Mark Carney is ana econonist in Canada. Mark Carney is who you mean.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
Even if Putin’s orange bitch did that, his fat, orange, fascist ass would still have to nominate a cabinet, and whoever was telling him which destructive shit to nominate would still be doing that.
And would Elon’s Nazi bitchass be running even more rough shod over our government?
Baud
So who is Art Carney?
sentient ai from the future
@sab: for many years i’ve heard chatter about how centimillionaires and billionaires will just up and leave the US if we tax them too much.
the data says, nope.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
OT: Just e-filed my taxes, so we’ll see if I get my tax return within 21 days. I did the IRS Free File thing like I always do via FreeTaxUSA.
Pretty easy and painless
Baud
@sentient ai from the future:
That’s too bad. We want them gone.
sentient ai from the future
@Baud: the guy who prints the posters when the carnival comes to town
Shalimar
@Elizabelle: Fuck. I knew it was a bad idea to sell the car.
sentient ai from the future
@Baud:
agreed, but it illustrates the size of the blind spot about wealth, which works best to ease one’s life when other essential services (like those provided by government) are easily accessible by all, and generous.
different-church-lady
@Elizabelle:
Have you seen how big “cars” are nowadays?
Fair Economist
@schrodingers_cat:
Oh yes. Verbal slips, too. Also they’ve also mysteriously lost interest in misleadingly cropped photos to make the President look bad.
VFX Lurker
Living in Los Angeles County with its many tiny parking spots, I don’t see the appeal of large and larger SUVs.
That said, an SUV could carry more when evacuating a wildfire. That may be their sole advantage to me.
YY_Sima Qian
@rebelsdad: The article is fairly long, so I don’t want to post it in full. Here are the some of the choicest bits:
Van Jackson then points out how the US had been at once the security bulwark in the Asia Pacific (which is the dominant self-conception of the bipartisan DC “Blob”, & to a much lesser extent Japan, SK, TW, Singapore & the Philippines), the imperious superpower & the aloof hegemony (the latter two the dominant perception in SE Asia & the Pacific Islands).
Jackson raises another example if GWB’s PEPFAR program that probably saved the lives of millions in Africa from AIDS, while ruined the lives of tens of millions through his GWOT, ending w/:
Turning to economics & their interaction w/ geopolitics (I added gift link to one of the FT articles in the excerpt, the other is in a subscription tier above what I have):
Jackson ends w/:
I think Jackson is underselling the US’ contribution to global final demand, especially consumer demand, & thus how painful the transition will be for the ROW. However, it is no longer true that “if when the US sneezes, the world catches cold”, the distribution of economic weight had long shifted. & in any case, consumer demand is not the only kind of demand there is. Countries w/ the fiscal space can choose to ramp up domestic investment into public goods &/or Military Keynesianism to generate demand, which is what the EU is embarking on.
Whatever is the case, Americans would do well to get out of the consciously Exceptionalist & unconsciously narcissistic mindset, born of internalized privilege from being residents/citizens of a superpower that [once] had military/economic/technological/financial/cultural hegemony over the world.
jowriter
@schrodingers_cat: This.
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat:
Engrave that somewhere. It is so true.
The Thin Black Duke
KARMALA HARRIS DID NOTHING WRONG.
Most American voters either voted for the racist because they’re racist or didn’t bother to vote because they didn’t care how having a racist in the White House would impact black people in the United States which means they’re racist too.
This isn’t hard.
Jay
@sab:
The top 10% of American households account for 50% of Consumer purchasing.
Income won’t drop for them, because most of it is passive, not earned. Tax breaks will actually increase their kept income.
As for they “economy”, they really aren’t part of in on a day to day basis. Rolex’s and Gucci bags don’t collect themselves.
I like to recount Malcolm’s experience. He made affordable sailboats for the middle class in the 70’s. Went bankrupt. Made upper mid level Cabin Cruisers for the Drs and Lawyers in the 80’s, went bankrupt. Made Mega yachts starting at 150 feet for the $100 millionaire class and the Billionaire class in the 90’s. Sold his Corp for a fortune in the late Aught’s. Retired offshore.
Or Paul’s. Red Seal Welder. Got his pipeline certs. Made enough money to open his own welding shop, doing technical welding. Went bankrupt when the 3rd Alberta Oil Boom collapsed. Took a second mortgage on his house, hooked up with an unemployed Automation Engineer, put one of those steel prefab warehouses on his lot.
Makes automated custom security gates, (they will stop an MRAP dead, can’t be climbed), that are also art. They start at $2.7 million installed. He has 8 years worth of orders lined up.
The current wealthy are not like you or me.
Ksmiami
@Elizabelle: guillotine, scaffolding/ tomato tomahto
YY_Sima Qian
@Jay: The Rafale is not a 5th gen fighter, does not have stealth, super cruise (which would be important given Canada’s expansive territory), super maneuverability, nor super sensory fusion. Ought to be sufficient for the Russian threat, but probably not for the American threat. (I say that in semi-jest.)
However, the Rafale does have the huge upside of giving Canada a truly sovereign capability, un beholden to the US.
sentient ai from the future
@The Thin Black Duke: a lot of the rejection of the civic responsibility for voting will be phrased, if you can cajole it out of them, as “i don’t want to always vote for the lesser evil”
but what is actually being said, and what they don’t want to acknowledge, is that they don’t want to do the fucking work to evaluate who is going to be the greatest evil, and who has the best chance of defeating them.
VFX Lurker
Amen.
different-church-lady
GODDAMN FOLKS, THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS NOT ONE OF THE EVILS!!!
sentient ai from the future
@YY_Sima Qian:
it’s almost as though “right to repair” and open source are actual military concerns, rather than the fixations of weird hippie tech folks
Martin
@different-church-lady: I never suggested they were.
I’m not the one here reducing our political parties to good/evil equivalents. They are imperfect. They can do better, and they should. Are you comfortable watching GOP voters being more anti-corporate than Democrats? Because if they embrace that after Trump, Democrats are fucked.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Does anybody have an opinion about that Van Jackson article, America’s Coming Great Depression, that YY_Sima Qian posed above?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
GOP is MAGA/Trumpism and MAGA/Trumpism is fascism. I’d say that’s unmistakably evil
And the GOP isn’t “anti-corporate”, they’re literally pro-oligarchy
Martin
@VFX Lurker: A 1970s VW bus had a larger interior volume than a 2025 Suburban, and weighed less than half as much. The VW could also seat 11 depending on configuration.
Martin
@YY_Sima Qian: The US doesn’t need superior capability when the USAF is 20x the size of the Canadian AF. Stack on the US navy and USMC which are both an order of magnitude larger than the Canadian Air Force. Canada could hold that off only with a nuke, and they can deliver that in a truck.
sentient ai from the future
@Martin: you keep using this phrase, “more anti-corporate”
i would like to see whatever evidence you have of this please.
cain
@Elizabelle: it’s gonna suck for the vichy times because their primary audience is likely liberals so I hope that with the recession they cancel their goddam subscription. I hope some of you will do the same.
sentient ai from the future
@Martin: and how would the world outside US borders see that conflict, and what consequences would that have for our military capabilities and alliances?
Citizen Alan
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I think Martin’s objection is his perception that she did that (campaign with Cheney) in lieu of continuing to run on economic inequality.
Martin
@The Thin Black Duke: Should the Democratic Party adopt a policy where people of color and women are not allowed to run as a party nominee because people of color cannot win? What’s the point of running a nominee that is guaranteed to lose?
I find this attitude defeatist.
YY_Sima Qian
@sentient ai from the future: Not Martin, but Canada will probably wage an insurgency (go Wolverines!), w/ somewhat overt help from the EU, & clandestine help from Russia & the PRC.
[Above is mostly tongue in cheek.]
bluefoot
@The Thin Black Duke: My sister, who lives in a purple-to-red area and is a public school teacher told me that once Harris was the nominee, she heard a LOT of people who were planning to sit out the election say that they had to vote in order to keep the brown/black woman out of power. There were people she interacted with at work, parents of her students, people in the store, etc etc. Just regular people. If that many were willing to say it in front of her, a brown woman, I can only imagine the number of “polite” people who wouldn’t say it to her face.
cain
@Suzanne: It’s like that because of the dotcom boom when normal people showed up and treated the stock market like it’s a casino. So now everything is about quarterly shit. Everybody wants to strike it rich by getting the right stocks.
Martin
@sentient ai from the future: I think if you are using the term ‘good billionaires’ from the top of the party apparatus, you’re pro-corporate.
We don’t really have a fight between the upper and lower classes in politics. We have a fight between one set of billionaires and another set of billionaires. One wants to loot the country faster than the other, but they both want to loot the country.
schrodingers_cat
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): He is not an economist. That’s not his area of expertise according to his own Twitter bio.
danielx
@JoyceH:
Well, it’s not a tan suit. So no media frenzy.
schrodingers_cat
@different-church-lady: I agree.
Martin
@sentient ai from the future: The US have such immense superiority, that if we decided to look at the Americas the way Hitler looked at Europe, we’d likely be able to maintain that state indefinitely. We have sufficient conventional and nuclear first-strike capability that we could probably keep any other nation from standing up sufficient force against us, probably indefinitely.
Assuming the American people continue to be passive toward the aggression of our government, of course.
Citizen Alan
@different-church-lady: Alas, not every single person in the Democratic Party is simultaneously Jesus Christ come again to solve all the world’s problems through overt miracle working. Being unable to achieve the twin statuses of moral perfection and flawless hyper-competence, the Dems are therefore “evil,” albeit less evil than the GOP. But they’ll still refuse to support the Dems because if they punish us enough, eventually we’ll be perfect enough to suit them.
YY_Sima Qian
@schrodingers_cat: Economists are not the only source of insight on economics, particularly given how broken the mainstream economic discipline has become. As I said in my comment to his article, I would not necessarily trust his prognosis that the US is headed toward a Great Depression (but if MAGA keeps this up…). However, if anyone is discombobulated as to why the Trump gang appears to be deliberately cratering the economy, I think Jackson’s comment on the political economy is on the mark, or at least worth entertaining.
That is not to say a cratered economy will necessarily redound to the benefit of the plutocrats & kleptocrats (kind of depends on whether there is a popular revolt against them), but that might be the thinking motivating the observed behavior.
Jay
@YY_Sima Qian:
The Rafale sensor pods beat the current F-16’s, and you don’t have to worry about the US switching them off. Supercruise is only needed in a “thirsty jet”. The Rafele has greater range than the F-35 and is also broken field rated, where Canada’s F-35 planned buys have to be modified. F-35’s are also not all aspect stealth. While the F-35 “deal” with Canada gives some production of components to Canadian companies, Rafale offered full co-production, with all aspects but some electronics being made in Canada under a Joint Company.
I am not worried about the US attacking Canada. I am worried about the US not allowing Canada to defend itself.
Back in the ’80’s, did an exercise at Cold Lake. At the time, the US Military was on steroids, and we had ’60’s FN’s, (semi auto .308, uncontrollable on full auto), 60’s M72 LAWS and Carl Gustav’s. We had LAV Cougar’s pretending to be tanks, (not in this exercise, but to train our tank crews, because we had very few running Leopard 1’s, a few Centurions and some WWII Shermans).
So, there was a Marine Brigade holding a 2500 foot hill, Northern Alberta tree’d and grass, with several cliffs and ravines. 650 men.
Our assigned task, (Seaforths 2nd Company and Recon Company, 200 men) was to push the Marines off the hill. Recon went in first, (we did not have PRC radio’s, so control was by runners). Took us 2 hours to do the job and the ref’s gave the Marines 60% casualties. Gave us 20 in total.
The Marine Officer in charge , complimented our Captain on the speed and tactics we used, and said “wow, you guys must train hard for this.”
Our Captain responded with yes, we train hard, one evening a week, one weekend a month, and two weeks in the summer.
Steve LaBonne
@bluefoot: Our country will meet its demise because of racism (and misogyny) and honestly, that will be fully deserved.
Citizen Alan
Then I’ll do it for you. The fight, IMO, is not between “good and evil,” it is between “Democrats and evil.” If you’re not on the side of the Dems, then whatever side you’re on, you’re helping the proliferation of obvious unambiguous evil.
cain
@Princess: Apparently some of these planes have a kill switch. WTF.
Matt McIrvin
@Steve LaBonne: Kids never deserve the misery their parents caused.
cain
@Hoodie: Russia won’t either. But they are laughing that they can now do stuff, but given how poorly they have been with Ukraine – I think they are not going to be the tiger they think they are.
No, it’s going to be the U.S./Russia combo that’s going to be nuts because U.S. will start giving weapons to Russia. Not sure how well the MAGA will accept that.
That said, Russia has a society MAGA loves.
different-church-lady
@Citizen Alan: No no no, Dems are MORE evil because they have to be perfect and they refuse to be!
cain
@sentient ai from the future: Moving off the dollar will alarm the oligarchs here.
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin: I think you are underestimating how much the US military has decayed due to 2 decades of GWOT, a decade & half of sequestration & CRs (which have hurt maintenance, training, recruitment, & readiness in general), & 3+ decades of complete broken procurement process.
I am sure what you described is the self-perception of MAGA, but it is no longer reflective of reality.
Is the US still the global military hegemony? Yes. Is it in a position to dictate terms to the ROW via military coercion (including threatening nukes)? I’d say no.
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin: Kids ARE the misery their parents cause.
Citizen Alan
@bluefoot: 17 years later, and I still remember sharing a table with a lawyer and casual acquaintance (who was the public defender in our town!) admit to me that he was terrified of Obama becoming president because he absolutely could not conceive of a black man obtaining that much power and not using it to take revenge on white people over this nation’s history of racism. Bear in mind, I’d had probably fewer than ten conversations with this man and none outside of a professional setting, and he was comfortable saying this to me.
catclub
also privileged non-voters
YY_Sima Qian
@cain: The plutocrats will simply move their wealth offshore &/or off USD assets.
Shalimar
@bluefoot: It’s going to be a terrible 4 years for all of us, but the only comfort is people like that are going to hurt when they expected to prosper.
different-church-lady
@YY_Sima Qian:
…it’s because they’re an idiot. THE TRUMP GANG JUST WANTS TO SMASH THINGS UP BECAUSE IT’S A POWER TRIP.
Citizen Alan
I stand by my belief that the field of Economics is a cargo cult and has been since at least the 1980s and possibly since it’s inception.
Shalimar
@Matt McIrvin: At least the kids will learn that their parents suck, if they survive.
Gloria DryGarden
@bluefoot: it shocks me. That they’d say it to her. But it shocks me that people think that way. Why don’t they see people as people?
seefleur
@Elizabelle: This is the first of my 3 wishes should I come across a dusty old lamp with a genie in it…
Jay
@Martin:
Canada’s population is over 40 million. We have 127 million guns. When war is called, 10% of us volunteer. So that’s 100,000+ regulars and militia, plus 3,900,000 irregulars. The Taliban had 45,000, the Iraqi Insurgents had 18,000, (not including the later ISIL).
The US has just over 2 million military members, (Active and Guard) with global responsibilities.
different-church-lady
@Martin:
AND THAT’S WHY WE NEED TO CLOSE THE BORDER!!1!
AxelFoley
@Citizen Alan:
DenzelWashingtonBoom.gif
schrodingers_cat
@YY_Sima Qian: His entire Twitter feed can be summed up in one sentence
The US sucks. And that’s been his stance for a while. His arguments are Chomskian.
danielx
@Elizabelle:
Add to that: the difference between bad and worse is a whole lot bigger than the difference between good and better.
Timill
@Martin: Not entirely clear (the Microbus is 140 cuft all in, the Suburban 123 cuft behind the front seats) but either would be better for living in than a Miata…
cmorenc
@schrodingers_cat: I wish Biden hadn’t picked the wrong night last June to have the worst performance of his entire political career – had he summoned the Biden who made a fool out of Paul Ryan or even the Biden of the Jan SOTU, he would have had a decent chance of being the second coming of Truman 1948. Instead, he got run over by a blustering bus of bullshit that night.
sentient ai from the future
@Martin:
how’d that immense superiority work out in vietnam? or afghanistan?
warfare is more than just lobbing explodey things.
NaijaGal
@Martin: This is why the US has been subverted by other means. If you can’t go toe to toe militarily against a superpower, you use the existing societal problems of that superpower to make it collapse from within. Racism and white supremacy are the US’s Achilles heel. Since almost every other country has had to understand the US better than it understands itself, it has been easy for Russia and others to exploit. And many still don’t get this. Even the oligarchs who think they will benefit are going to find out that an America where a billionaire can fall to his/her death from a first floor window like in Russia, isn’t that secure.
Other countries have agency. Divide and conquer works on underdeveloped countries and on developed ones. Even I knew something about the US’s fault lines as a teenager before I ever set foot on US soil, just by reading American books, talk less of the spy agencies of a Russia or China, etc.
different-church-lady
@sentient ai from the future:
Wait, now you tell me?
geg6
@Elizabelle:
I have an extra pair of knitting needles. Come sit by me.
u
@cmorenc: Well, maybe. But the idiots who chose Trump over Kamala in November probably would have chosen Trump over Biden if Biden had stayed in the race. The appalling stupidity of about half the people in the United States is the underlying problem.
NaijaGal
@sentient ai from the future: This as well…
u
@Citizen Alan: As an economics major back in the seventies, I can assure you that prosperity is guaranteed if you only worship the correct gods in the correct way.
Elizabelle
@seefleur: I will help you look!
@geg6: We are going to be a nation of Madame Defarges. And: weapons!
YY_Sima Qian
@schrodingers_cat: Unlike Chomsky, Jackson does not make excuses for Russia, the PRC, & India & place all of the blame on the US or the West.
However, he does focus on the US’ failings & pathologies, things w/in the US’ control.
No One of Consequence
@Elizabelle: I dislike petty cosmetic commentary, because I have a face for radio, but I must admit, I do NOT understand the lip inflation thing. You want fuller-looking lips? I guess I can understand that. But it seems to me like they scream out 25lb psi !!! Icky.
Wasn’t it Joan Rivers who said: “I plan on having face-lifts until my ears meet.”
Another look I don’t understand. Like someone caught one’s ponytail in a bailing machine.
Again, from one who’s own visage could pause an atomic clock.
-NOoC
Ksmiami
@u: completely. Our nation is at the point of being too stupid to live.
sentient ai from the future
@Martin: a 1970s VW bus had an air-cooled I4 boxer engine. even through the early 1980s, when i think liquid cooling was introduced, the displacement never went above like 2L. my understanding is peripheral but i’ve been vw-van-culture-adjacent for many years even though i’ve never owned one.
what i’m getting at here is that a 2025 suburban is necessarily using some of that envelope for other things. like an engine that can reliably haul an actual 11 people at reasonable highway speeds. and crumple zones to reduce fatalities in an accidental collision.
the original VW bus engine only made like 40 fucking horsepower.
YY_Sima Qian
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): NDD & others have talked about the underlying weaknesses of the US economy during Biden’s term, particularly ’23 – ’24. Jay’s fascinating vignettes of “Malcolm” & “Paul” are reflections of how the existence of the plutocrats & the kleptocrats are now completely divorced from the plebs (short of mass rebellion, violent or not).
Eunicecycle
@Citizen Alan: This. I’ve heard so many people say “I’m tired of having to choose the lesser of two evils.” Harris is not evil, for God’s sake. Trump is evil. It should have been easy.
Eunicecycle
@Citizen Alan: and this, too.
schrodingers_cat
@YY_Sima Qian: IDK enough about this person I just found out about his in this thread. But he has been down on the US for a while, just based on his own tweets
There are a lot of leftists who seem quite happy to see the US cut down to size. He seems to be one of them. It is the easiest way to get likes on Twitter and this was true long before Musk took over.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, the shock shocking story of how the All Powerful Woke Mob destroyed another great American business.
What’s that??
VirginiaMercury.com:
[ womp, womp ]
It’s a good, if unsurprising, read.
Best wishes,
Scott.
YY_Sima Qian
@different-church-lady: In the past, Trump has been very sensitive to stock market performance. Ordinarily, the oligarchs/plutocrats that surround him should prefer to keep the asset price bubble growing for as long as possible.
So, when the gang seems to insist on cratering the US economy, it’s worth trying to understand why.
sentient ai from the future
@Eunicecycle: what those people are actually saying is “i’m tired/avoidant of trying to evaluate and balance the needs of others against my own wants.”
and someone like this wants a distinct place in the hierarchy, not a democracy. democracy is messy and requires critical thought on a day to day basis.
Jackie
@different-church-lady:
I have a little Vibe, which I adore, but wouldn’t want it to be my tiny house.
sentient ai from the future
@Jackie: when the kiddo is safely out of the house and into adulthood, it’s going to be either a sailboat or an electric van for me, depending on my level of physical infirmity.
Another Scott
@Martin: @sentient ai from the future:
It may fit 12 people, but at least half of them will have to get out and push each time they encounter a hill.
My best friend in high school had a 1970 Microbus. It struggled at highway speeds if there were more than 2-3 people in it.
Different machines for different times.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Eunicecycle
@sentient ai from the future: you are right, too.
Darkrose
@Martin: I remember back in July, when you said something similar to those of us—Black and Brown women included—expressing concern about whether white people would vote for Harris. Now that our concerns have been borne out, you’re still arguing that pointing out misogynoir is the same as accepting it.
If I’m saying “I don’t think white voters will elect a Black woman,” do you really think I’m saying “Democrats shouldn’t nominate another Black woman,” or am I saying that we have a problem with white racism and misogyny, and maybe y’all need to work on your people?
Peale
@Martin: The micro bus’s competition was other vans. The SUV originally was a modified truck. The modern SUV/Crossover is a passenger vehicle that replaced the station wagon and the minivan. So there would be more room in a VW van from the 1970s because it was a box hauling vehicle with seats put in as an line extension. Volume is what vans are supposed to have. Comfort, not so much.
YY_Sima Qian
@schrodingers_cat: He worked in Obama’s DOD, was a die in the wool US primacist & a conventional liberal at the time, but the experiences of the Trump 45 term (& the continuities he saw in the substance of FP from Obama to Trump to Biden) had caused him to completely reevaluate all of his priors. He has certainly turned sharply left on both FP & domestic policy, since 2018 or so, but he is a serious & IMHO perspicacious FP scholar (who is gaining more recognition now that the Dems are out of power) & not just an “online dirtbag lefty” out for clicks. His recent books: Pacific Power Paradox, Grand Strategy of the Left, & the Rivalry Peril are all worth reading.
One does not need to agreed w/ all of his analyses or recommendations, I don’t, but heterodox voices such as his should be more prominent in the debate in the US.
I do agree he slags Dems a bit too much, but most of his fire is trained on the MAGA reactionaries & the frightening future they are trying to bring forth.
Peke Daddy
Full spectrum dominance is harder with China restricting strategic materials exports.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Steve LaBonne: and regulations
Do not forget that!!
These fellows really like to go boom boom and expect to be coddled* when instead they go bust bust
* made whole
bluefoot
@Citizen Alan: I wish I could say I was surprised. I once heard a Nobel Prize winner say to the head of our department at a professional dinner that all of “those people” (black people) want to kill all of “us” (he meant white people), and how “they” would grab any any chance to do so. Wtaf?
bluefoot
@Shalimar:
I’m in the curious position of unexpectedly having to find a new place to live. As a brown woman in Boston. So far the apartment hunt hasn’t been filled with sunshine and rainbows since the new administration has made is clear overt racism is a-okay.
Gloria DryGarden
@Martin: you think? After firing almost everyone of experience and expertise..?
Martin
@Citizen Alan: Yep, that message vanished by October 1.
BarcaChicago
@Darkrose: THANK YOU.
Martin
@Jay: What matters is who shows up. Ukraine mobilizes their population and they can hold a larger force, but also a force unwilling to use its larger options.
If the American public line up behind an expansionist nation, you won’t have just a 2 million strong military. If the American public fight hard against it, you’ll struggle to maintain that. That’s my point.
And if Donald ‘whats the point of having nukes if you don’t use them’ Trump is really committed to the idea, then Canada doesn’t stand a chance no matter how determined its citienzery is. I didn’t throw in the nuclear exchange line for color.
Kelly
@sentient ai from the future: About that air cooled boxer engine in VW buses. I went on many adventures with my buddy in his VW bus. Including one where I scraped our frozen breath off the inside of the windshield.
Martin
@sentient ai from the future: Our goals in Vietnam and Afghanistan wasn’t national expansion. You can’t compare those. If a US determined to take Canada as a territorial expansion, and with a populace in support of that, threw the resources necessary to achieve that goal at the task, it would happen. It’s not as simple as having the hardware, it requires having the popular will as well. That’s on us to support or fight it.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Martin: True and yet, for the first time in what? over 50 years, we saw one of those problems, inequality move in the right direction, down.
Rent seeking held fairly steady too. If we actually got non competes in the entire country as Joe Biden’s FTC chair enacted (& con 5th circuit judges corruptly stopped) rent seeking would be subject to much stiffer competition which is generally (at least) herbicide to valueless rent seeking.
We also saw FTC director Lena Khan coming for price fixing in residential real estate. That might have helped solve the spike in housing costs problem; although, it may have more to do with turning residential real estate into hotels without regulation.
In other words, the economy was doing wonderfully well by moving in the right direction on 1 out 3 and trying good notions on the other 2.
Surely, we can simultaneously prove democratic economic prosperity beats con tax cut/deregulate recession, while also acknowledging there is much economic gardening still needs done.
I hope we can anyway. We will not find many defectors from the GOP cult if we sound like both sides suck on the economy. I am almost sure you agree here. Both sides do not.
The GOP screws the economic pooch, leaves the Democrats holding the bag and claims credit for all the ideas the Democrats fertilize with that bag of poop the Democrats transform into a rich, fecund compost.
No doubt all of this can be said more succinctly. Please join me in sharing this freakingly obvious truth.
Martin
@sentient ai from the future: My point is that hauling capability is almost completely decoupled from the features the automotive industry tell you that you need. My Honda Element could carry more than a Suburban and was shorter than a Civic.
We can choose to have physically small cars that have good hauling capacity. We choose not to.
BarcaChicago
@Martin: You’re saying that the economic message VANISHED starting in October? Really? That’s just nonsense. From October until Election Day I was canvassing consistently, attending rallies, connected to the campaign through multiple mediums constantly every day. Total nonsense. It was at the core every day, all day.
sentient ai from the future
@Martin: i goddamn well can compare them and i just did. our goals were hegemony then and they are hegemony now. i dont know what makes you think you have the credibility to opine on this topic, but it’s probably scheduled.
you’re full of shit and thats probably not a good thing to put into a pie, but into the pie you go.
sentient ai from the future
@Martin:
you have zero understanding of what you’re talking about. bye.
Aziz, light!
@sentient ai from the future: Wait till he gives you the long-form preachy lecture about your unforgivable choice of Vehicle That You Enjoy, which is rich coming from someone in the car culture capital of the world.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@bluefoot: What?
Somebody should have told that ignorant human about Dr. Charles Drew, a black man, whose work likely saved more lives than maybe anyone else. Dr. Drew was, and continues to be after his untimely death, a life saver.
https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2023/02/08/dr-charles-drew-a-pioneer-in-blood-transfusions/
That link is to our National Archives.
if Dr. Drew’s entry disappears suddenly soon, it is up to us to remember he existed and how very much we owe him.
I recommend remembering Dr. Drew to ignorant, frightened bigots, like the one you noticed, calmly. Dr. Drew’s amazingness truly is a kind of (hopefully not temporary) racist defanger.
Peale
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
O.K. the issue of the growing power of oligarchs and rent seeking thereby is an issue. But…
Ramalama
@sentient ai from the future: Cory doctorow talks a lot about right to repair and how digital locks are part of the enshittification. His tone is strident, but his ideas are very good.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham
YY_Sima Qian
@Peale: Social welfare that are not indexed to inflation declined in real terms compared to pre-pandemic, because they failed to keep pace w/ inflation despite the increases in nominal spending. The COVID-19 induced inflations was due mostly to supply shock, not demand shock (except consumer electronics), & w/ price gauging by sellers on top of it (i.e. “Seller’s Inflation”). There are government interventions such as price controls, enforcement against price gauging & taxing excess profits that proved effective elsewhere (Spain), which were not attempted in the US. NDD has written quite a bit about the impact of rapidly rising housing prices & high mortgage rates. Basically, the positive aggregate numbers hid increasing disparities & real precarity that significant segments of the population faced. One signal is that the top 10% of income earners accounted for nearly 50% of all private consumption.
In any case, Van Jackson is not an authoritative voice on macroeconomic analysis. He is, after all, an IR scholar (but most of economists are not necessarily authoritative, either). However, his take on why the Trump gang seems determined to stay the course toward cratering the US economy, I think is on point.
danielx
@sentient ai from the future:
Yep. Friend of mine had one, on a good day with two people in it it would go maybe 60. With a tailwind.
Edit: then there was the whole thing about leg amputation in the event of a frontal collision. Plus every small town cop having conniptions about VW vans full of dirty fucking hippies who were out to make time with small town girls. With reason, granted.
Kayla Rudbek
@Citizen Alan: Chicago school of economics is Calvinist theology masquerading as a social science
Ruckus
@Baud:
There is a reason I came up with the moniker of shitforbrains.
We are ALL now seeing what happens when someone who can’t even understand sun come up – sun go down, nor anyway to actually make $1.00 in profit. Someone who just stumbles along with one thought – how great he is, all the while continuing to prove that he is the bottom of the pile, worse than useless, waste of oxygen (and everything else) that at least many of us know he is.
Ruckus
@YY_Sima Qian:
I have not been in the US military for decades but if what I saw before I was discharged continued in any way, I’d have to agree with you. Now as stated it’s been a very long time and no one is still in that was when I was discharged. So I really have zero knowledge but there is an abundance of “We do not need to change!” in the military, it’s basically the standard. Now that said, there have been some solid changes, but the concept of how much of it operates I doubt has changed substantially. I could be 1000% wrong. In some ways that could be very good. In some ways not so much.
Jay
@Martin:
I am currently training up/helping to train up the 4th Company of the Seaforth Highlanders. Since the end of the Korean War, we have never had more than 1 Company rated as active.
So, we have gone from 200 soldiers to 800 soldiers in just over a month, all volunteers, Some of us older people have only 4 combat tours, some have 16.
Scuttlebutt is, we are going to get split up over the next two months to form 8 full Companies. The Regiment has not had 8 full Companies since WWI. That’s 1600 soldiers.
All 16 Militia Regiments are reporting the same. 32,000 volunteers have signed up in less than 2 months.
Ukraine’s bottleneck is demographic. They have 20 times the number of 50 and 60 year olds, than 18-25. They don’t want to draft their under 25’s, (although lots volunteer), because that is their “seed corn”.
Canada does not have that issue. I have to alternate fire arms safety training with zit treatment advice, and man, is it ever a mix. Back in the day, when I was a “cadet”, 80% white male, now it is the full rainbow.
ron
@Another Scott: and if it got in a crash at speed everyone inside would be maimed or dead. Those things were tin cans with bike wheels.
mrmoshpotato
What is this LA police chase? Is OJ threatening to shoot his murderous bitchass again?
ron
The “mess” that Trump inherited and is currently “fixing.”
From last October in The Economist: The American Economy, The Envy of The World
Jay
@mrmoshpotato:
Paper plates, (Sovereign Citizen),
Black Accord,
Not OJ, Oj’s dead,
sab
@Jay: Martin (hours ago) was possibly suggesting that Americsn nukes give us an edge over Canada. That really doesn’t work with contiguous countries.
I live in Ohio and we got lungs full of smoke during the far-away Quebec fires the last few years. I assume nuclear fallout would be the same. I hope to God there would be people with enough functionning brain cells to tell Trump that nuking anywhere worthwhile in Canada (Ontario) would be very bad for Trump Towers in NYC, and probably most of the eastern US.
Everywhere else in Canada is “worthwhile” in Canada is me trying to get inside Trump’s damaged head based in NYC and Mar a Lago.
Obviously I actually believe the rest of Canada is also very worthwhile.
Matt McIrvin
@sab: The US absolutely could not hold Canada if it invaded. We couldn’t even manage a reasonable end state for Iraq.
We could, however, physically destroy Canada. It would be pretty pointless though. See Russia/Ukraine.
That said, I’ve feared for a long time that Trump might intentionally nuke the United States, and the damage to the US from nuking Canada would be less.
sab
@Matt McIrvin: I share your concern about Trump. He hates us because he hates everything and everyone including himself.
Jay
@sab:
I have had 4 combat deployments. I am militia, Like your National Guard, but with way less modern combat arms.
The Congo, drugged up children soldiers.
Rwanda,
Kosovo, against US armed and and trained Croats.
Afghanistan.
I have done 47 exercises against US troops in Canada. Never lost. And we are weekend soldiers. Part time. I do my HALO certs on my own dime. We have members, (all gens) who start their day, running the North Shore trail, from Deep Cove, to Horseshoe bay, and back, every day, and it’s a rough hiking trail.
Then they go to their jobs,
One thing, I teach is “cleaning” Given the conditions, a medic says they, (enemy) can’t be saved, we kill them. Quick death.
Jay
Sorry, Bosnia, not Kosovo.
Ramalama
@Jay: holy shit, Jay. What haven’t you done? You’ve got so many skill sets.
YY_Sima Qian
@Jay: IIRC, you were at Medak Pocket with 2PPCLI, correct?
PBK
@YY_Sima Qian: May I ask what is “NDD” in your comment #224?
YY_Sima Qian
@PBK: New Deal Democrat, frequent & IMHO high quality commenter here.
PBK
@YY_Sima Qian: Aah, thank you! Also glad to see you posting in more threads.
YY_Sima Qian
@PBK: You are too kind.