A bunch of the tariffs still haven't even taken effect (despite his repeatedly saying they were hitting at midnight when he made the announcement Tuesday—I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when I found out Wednesday that that was bullshit, but I still was).
This continues to mostly be harm from him just constantly going back and forth on the notion. It can get so much worse if he sticks with it this time.
And yet he's brainwashed (slightly less than) half of the population into believing heart and soul that he's here to save Western civilization. By ushering in the end of American hegemony and paving the way for China and Russia. We really are living in the post-truth era.
I don't think the public opinion is as dire as it seems. He has a very vocal cult following, but the real swing in the election was politically disaffected people who are just really hard to reach. This is sad but the good news is that it's just a matter of reaching them — and MAGA is clearly and demonstrably failing on the number one issue for the vast majority of voters which is economy.
The democrats have an even lower approval rating and seem to be staunchly refusing to change. Assuming we still have elections, I don't see how it ends as anything other than swapping desperately back and forth between the two corporate parties.
> The democrats have an even lower approval rating and seem to be staunchly refusing to change.
These two statements can't both be true for very long. The Democratic Party is going to reinvent itself. Turbulent and uncertain though it may be, this is how it works.
The GOP just used its generational transformation, has been given free rein to prove their ideas, and lo and behold: they suck!
They haven't yet - they approved Trump's budget bill and Marco Rubio was voted in unanimously 99-0. They're still doing talks alongside Peter Thiel. Protestors are being arrested by Blue Govenors in Blue States.
I used to be more hopeful but if they won't act now, in the direst of times, then they must actually be completely bought by corporate interests.
Parties don't change by the individuals within them changing their minds, they change by replacing the individuals. People are absolutely livid about the things you're mentioning, which is why their approval ratings are low, which is why they're going to be replaced.
> then they must actually be completely bought by corporate interests.
This is a non-sequitur. I know it's an easy out to avoid thinking through the actual mechanics at play here (one of which is certainly corporate interests), but it's worth being more curious about this stuff and the individuals' motivations.
It seems like their plan is a repeat of 2016, 2020, and 2024- to hope that Trump will be so unpopular that they can get elected without changing anything.
Don't just hope! Find and back new candidates in your local area who will represent the change you want to see. Politics at the end of the day is just conversations like these.
Other than the stock market what metric are you using to indicate that the economy is doing badly? A jobs report just came out today indicating good growth there.
The only leading indicators that really matter due to their self-fulfilling nature: people's confidence. The below is from before he started doing the thing "he's not stupid enough to do," these tariffs.
> A poll of more than 220 U.S. CEOs finds business confidence at lowest level since November 2012—and recession fears on the rise.
> Consumers’ expectations for the future at a 12-year low
Consumer confidence isn’t actually a metric of the economy. At best it’s a correlate to an actual indicator, which can be something you can link if available.
Simplest way to make my point is to look at the confidence during covid vs January of this year.
There’s no such thing as an “actual indicator.” The economy isn’t a real thing that exists. It’s all correlates, some leading, some trailing, some accurate, and some inaccurate.
The contents of the shopping cart of the person in front of you is an indicator.
> The contents of the shopping cart of the person in front of you is an indicator.
yes.
> It’s all correlates, some leading, some trailing, some accurate, and some inaccurate.
no. some things are actually measured, like employment rate.
sentiment also can be measured, but is meaningless, because it can contradict behavior, which actually affects the real world. sentiment certainly is correlated to behavior, which is why it's a good leading indicator, but is often wrong about what is happening (see the USA 2024 election, and covid).
> no. some things are actually measured, like employment rate.
Sure, employment rate is measured though uhh, via a survey just like consumer sentiment. The relationship between employment rate and "the economy?" A correlation.
The rest of your comment is umm... internally contradictory.
Trump is supported by the people running Silicon Valley (Musk, Thiel, Andreessen - with Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos financing his inaugural), hedge fun titans like Robert Mercer, heartland industrialist like the Uihleins. Plus white, Christian, married families who don't live in large coastal cities support him in the majority.
So I take this in the dialectic sense - that it is not destructive but self-destructive.
Also the opposition's obsession with Russia points to their loss. The average American doesn't give a damn what Putin thinks. Trump is focused on the US (or maybe Canada or Greenland) while the opposition is focused on Russia. Liberal Denocrats disliked Russia when Khrushchev was in charge too, they just have some anti-Russian animus that you can read about in the New York Times back to 1925 and before.
In 2012 the Republican candidate for president said that Russia was our biggest geopolitical adversary in the debates and the left laughed at him. Obama said something flippant about the 80s
Mitch McConnell, arguably the most powerful Republican senator in a generation, has also recently issued a rare criticism of Trump and his alliance with Putin, deeply damaging his own standing in his party.
We can also add many other conservative leaders who are no longer in power to that list, because there is no space for dissent in a fascist party.
But please continue to try and strawman the left as having no good reason aside from loss to raise the alarm on an obvious Russian asset controlling the worlds largest superpower
The damage to Tesla's brand is irreversible. Musk has done literally everything in his power to alienate the core EV-buying demographic and the product itself is no longer unique or even particularly competitive. Maybe tariffs can prop up Tesla's auto business for a while longer but otherwise his only hope is for the MAGA set to suddenly pull an ideological 180 on EVs.
I tend to believe that, while this may be a slight overstatement, the damage will take more time and effort to mitigate than it took to create, but even so, the market likely has priced in Musk continuing in his current role and extending the damage, so from that perspective a bounce back when it appears that the end of that is near still makes sense.
Wait, did they reverse their stance on this again? I thought they had finally started to open the mount up to 3rd parties. Really disappointing to hear that this is not actually the case.
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive / snarky / tropey comments here. It leads to generic / repetitive / nasty discussion, and we're hoping to avoid that here.
The genius behind crypto is that it's not just the extremely gullible. I know a fair number of really smart people, academics even, that have bought into the cryptocurrency hype.
It has this kind of veil of "high techness" to it that is appealing to smart-but-uninformed people (like me in 2021). I'm embarrassed that I fell for it, but on the bright side it does make me a bit more sympathetic for other people who also fell for it.
> The genius behind crypto is that it's not just the extremely gullible.
I don't know about you, but I barely follow cryptocurrency news, and I've still been hearing about major players getting "hacked" several times a year for over a decade.
Either it's Mt Gox or FTX or The DAO or Bitfinex or QuadrigaCX or Terra/Luna or rug-pull meme coins or dollar-backed coins that actually aren't or any of a dozen other things.
Anyone who isn't being extremely careful to avoid scams, given the constant drumbeat of reports about how you have to be extremely careful to avoid scams when dealing with cryptocurrency, is pretty gullible.
Ironically I think being more educated might sabotage you more with cryptocurrency.
My parents, both smart people but neither of which know much about distributed systems or concurrent computing or cryptocurrency, see the news reports about Mt Gox or BitConnect and think "that sounds like a scam", avoid it, and put money into a Vanguard or something.
On the other hand, you have people like me (and probably a not-insignificant percentage of people on HN), who have learned a fair amount of distributed and concurrent programming, and see the "neatness" factor of cryptocurrency, and since the crypto is laundered through interesting tech, we fall for it.
I haven't touched any cryptocurrency since I fell for the unregistered security calling itself Gemini Earn [1] (so almost three years now), but I did think that stuff like Filecoin was pretty cool. Hell, I'll still acknowledge the coolness factor of stuff like Filecoin and Storj and Sia. I just think that the currency itself is wishful-thinking-at-best, and fraudulent at worst (probably somewhere in between).
I don't think I'm an especially gullible person, but no one thinks that they're gullible, so I'll acknowledge that I probably am, but I think a lot of the educated people who got into crypto got into it because they kind of had horse-blinders on when looking at the interesting tech.
I don't think most academics would fall for the "Nigerian Prince" chain emails, or the "Romance Scams" you see on YouTube, which are things I usually associate with extremely gullible people.
Sure, I'll totally acknowledge that some of the distributed algorithms that have spun out of the blockchain are pretty cool, and I'll even go as far as to say that maybe someday we'll find some very cool high-value uses from them.
Pretend money, at least in my opinion, is not one of those uses.
I don't know, I think some of the papers for distributed consensus might lead to something cool; if nothing else it does seem to be increasing the use of formal methods, which I think is neat.
These things can take time; it might be thirty years or more before someone does anything actually useful with the stuff learned from the crypto world.
Thinking you can store your crypto with some 3rd party that _definitely_ won't get hacked (or """hacked"""), also thinking your crypto won't become worthless from a singular unusual event. Actually the most gullible are the people who think of cryptocurrency as an "investment" XD
I don't know. I always store my crypto offline. I bought $1000 worth of bitcoin when it was less than $100 per bitcoin because it seemed like something that could get big at some point, and I was willing to risk $1000 on that thought.
My thought was it will some day either be worth a lot or be worth 0 and I'm OK with both of those possibilities. I don't really think I was gullible about anything and yes I thought about it as a risky investment that turned out to pay off quite well.
It’s an investment the same way that playing the lottery is. I had a family member win ~$30MM back in the 80s, but he had played the same numbers for decades; someone who knew of this stole the winning tickets and he ended up only getting 7.5MM of the winnings after a protracted court case.
Crypto is the same thing. You put money in and you may cash out quickly with a big number, but someone who knows can swoop in and steal your money in a way that is much easier than if you used more traditional investment and banking vehicles.
