EPTEither the problem only exists because Americans as a nationality are unique and incurably insane, or it is because of conditions in America that can be effected and changed.
US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5334
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Gorsameth
Netherlands22190 Posts
Either the problem only exists because Americans as a nationality are unique and incurably insane, or it is because of conditions in America that can be effected and changed. | ||
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oBlade
United States6002 Posts
On October 29 2025 23:11 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Maybe compare us to all of the OECD instead of cherry-picking the only one that might be a counterexample (Mexico): https://www.oecd.org/en/about/members-partners.html Hint: You're wrong. What conclusions have you drawn by narrowing your view to the OECD, which is half made up of countries of less than 20 million people that are the size of Iowa, that invalidate my comparison to the US's neighbor, and to the two most populous countries in the Americas after the US? The US remains almost exactly at the global average homicide rate. Choosing to only compare to OECD countries would be cherry picking. The US has the most guns in the world. No contest. Any subset of nations including the US immediately means the US has the most guns in that group. Among Vatican City, Qatar, Singapore, Malta, and the US, the US has the highest homicide rate and most guns. So the guns are the whole and only story right? Okay, among Mexico, Iraq, South Africa, Haiti, Brazil, Nigeria, Uganda, and the US, the US has the lowest homicide rate and the most guns. The guns must be what's keeping Americans safer. It is trivial to make groups like this. And it's not a joke, for example to people in Mexico for whom the right to bear arms would mean lifesaving protection. Explain the relevance as to why we should care about the OECD-ness of a country other than it's a group that fits what you already concluded. It's the organization for economic development. Not Utopia Nations. The US constantly grows GDP and employment and trade, like these other countries that share the same goal, but unlike them it's also leaving some people behind, causing the persistence of a dangerous criminal underclass with anxious people who go postal? That's fine and could make sense. It just has nothing to do with gun control. Mexico used to have a lower and decreasing homicide rate. Now it's elevated and increasing. Why is your conclusion not "If you're in the OECD and face a crime epidemic, don't follow the gun control that Mexico, in the OECD, did?" On October 29 2025 23:11 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Also, suggesting we use magic instead of reducing guns is a clear concession on your part. You just brought that up dude. If we magically removed all the guns from the United States, our homicide rate (and our suicide rate) would drastically decrease. But fine, you want to look at OECD? What does it tell us? I'm thinking your ideal is something like you'd like to teleport to being Japan or Korea. Problem is, we can't. So try step by step: You want to start "reducing" 1 billion guns with that in mind, there's going to be multiple stops at Mexico and Brazil and Costa Rica and South Africa before you reach your goal. And by that time the train might have derailed completely meaning we're never making it to the destination. That's why you used the word "magically" and then instantly forgot and thought I suggested it. Except for the OECD countries with huge crime problems, Costa Rica and Mexico, the US stands out as having the worst crime, especially homicide. This must be the gun rate? But also in the OECD is Switzerland, which has the guns without the crime. Perhaps the US being massive, and a bifurcating society with massive organized crime as well as an underclass of career criminals and rampant drug and mental health problems is part of why it's at the world average homicide rate, while most of the OECD is below average. Since none of the other OECD countries share all of those traits. Do they? Want to work on those since we haven't invented magic yet for the gun removal? | ||
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Velr
Switzerland10870 Posts
What conclusions have you drawn by narrowing your view to the OECD, which is half made up of countries of less than 20 million people that are the size of Iowa, that invalidate my comparison to the US's neighbor, and to the two most populous countries in the Americas after the US? The US remains almost exactly at the global average homicide rate. Choosing to only compare to OECD countries would be cherry picking. If the richest country on earth is performing anything near "average" on basically any global metric, thats a very bad sign for that country. Especially when it's on stuff like criminality, violence, prison population, health care..... But I agree "magiking" the guns away isn't possible. Slowly working towards getting away from the moronic cowboy culture and adressing poverty/organized crime would probably help tremendously. Yes, Switzerland also has a lot of guns, but the culture around them is entirely different. Basically no one sees them as a tool for self defense here. We also don't see guns as a tool to defend us from the state/goverment overreach, if anything we see them as a tool to defend our state. Also: I don't see americans comparing themselves to Mexico or Brazil when it comes to anything usually... Let alone some super poor 3d world countries or outright failed states. | ||
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DarkPlasmaBall
United States45431 Posts
On October 30 2025 00:18 oBlade wrote: What conclusions have you drawn by narrowing your view to the OECD, which is half made up of countries of less than 20 million people that are the size of Iowa, that invalidate my comparison to the US's neighbor, and to the two most populous countries in the Americas after the US? The US remains almost exactly at the global average homicide rate. Choosing to only compare to OECD countries would be cherry picking. The US has the most guns in the world. No contest. Any subset of nations including the US immediately means the US has the most guns in that group. Among Vatican City, Qatar, Singapore, Malta, and the US, the US has the highest homicide rate and most guns. So the guns are the whole and only story right? Okay, among Mexico, Iraq, South Africa, Haiti, Brazil, Nigeria, Uganda, and the US, the US has the lowest homicide rate and the most guns. The guns must be what's keeping Americans safer. It is trivial to make groups like this. And it's not a joke, for example to people in Mexico for whom the right to bear arms would mean lifesaving protection. Explain the relevance as to why we should care about the OECD-ness of a country other than it's a group that fits what you already concluded. It's the organization for economic development. Not Utopia Nations. The US constantly grows GDP and employment and trade, like these other countries that share the same goal, but unlike them it's also leaving some people behind, causing the persistence of a dangerous criminal underclass with anxious people who go postal? That's fine and could make sense. It just has nothing to do with gun control. Mexico used to have a lower and decreasing homicide rate. Now it's elevated and increasing. Why is your conclusion not "If you're in the OECD and face a crime epidemic, don't follow the gun control that Mexico, in the OECD, did?" You just brought that up dude. But fine, you want to look at OECD? What does it tell us? I'm thinking your ideal is something like you'd like to teleport to being Japan or Korea. Problem is, we can't. So try step by step: You want to start "reducing" 1 billion guns with that in mind, there's going to be multiple stops at Mexico and Brazil and Costa Rica and South Africa before you reach your goal. And by that time the train might have derailed completely meaning we're never making it to the destination. That's why you used the word "magically" and then instantly forgot and thought I suggested it. Except for the OECD countries with huge crime problems, Costa Rica and Mexico, the US stands out as having the worst crime, especially homicide. This must be the gun rate? But also in the OECD is Switzerland, which has the guns without the crime. Perhaps the US being massive, and a bifurcating society with massive organized crime as well as an underclass of career criminals and rampant drug and mental health problems is part of why it's at the world average homicide rate, while most of the OECD is below average. Since none of the other OECD countries share all of those traits. Do they? Want to work on those since we haven't invented magic yet for the gun removal? oBlade, OECD countries typically have proportionally similar wealth, policies, and other first-world properties that the United States either has or strives to have, making them good points of comparison. It's silly to compare the United States to third-world countries or a global average. For those reasons, your comparison of the United States to Uganda, Nigeria, and Iraq is irrelevant. And when you talk about using magic to make Americans less homicidal, you're implying that Americans are inherently more murderous (even without guns). Please explain how you know that the suicide and homicide rates in this country wouldn't decrease if guns weren't around - that they would stay the same even without guns - despite the data showing how other first-world countries don't have this same violence issue that we have. After that, feel free to explain why the red, conservative, super-pro-gun states have higher mortality rates from guns than blue, liberal, gun-control states, because even within our own country we see the link between guns and gun deaths: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/state-stats/deaths/firearms.html | ||
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ChristianS
United States3304 Posts
They’ve been mercurial all year, and worse, they’re almost certain to continue that way. Volatility is bad for a lot, but it’s great for insider trading, and there’s every reason to believe that people in the administration are profiting off every market swing caused by the administration’s own vacillation. So… why aren’t things worse? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think most people are optimistic about the economy right now. But if you were going to list things the White House could do to intentionally crater the economy, we’ve been watching a lot of them happen and so far it’s been, what, kind of a modest decline? I’ve seen the theory that it’s being buoyed by an AI bubble and the crash is still incoming, but even if that’s true, why don’t we see the contraction you’d expect in industries that have nothing to do with AI? I mean, they’re having random tariffs applied at the drop of a hat, the government is randomly meddling to pay off cronies. It seems like companies and investors taking a conservative approach would just be rational. What am I missing? | ||
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Yurie
12076 Posts
On October 30 2025 01:05 ChristianS wrote: Something I don’t understand about the present moment is the macroeconomic picture. It’s been canonical wisdom for ages that Wall Street hates uncertainty, and that more than any particular policy, the economy benefits from *knowing what the policy will be* and suffers when things are mercurial. They’ve been mercurial all year, and worse, they’re almost certain to continue that way. Volatility is bad for a lot, but it’s great for insider trading, and there’s every reason to believe that people in the administration are profiting off every market swing caused by the administration’s own vacillation. So… why aren’t things worse? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think most people are optimistic about the economy right now. But if you were going to list things the White House could do to intentionally crater the economy, we’ve been watching a lot of them happen and so far it’s been, what, kind of a modest decline? I’ve seen the theory that it’s being buoyed by an AI bubble and the crash is still incoming, but even if that’s true, why don’t we see the contraction you’d expect in industries that have nothing to do with AI? I mean, they’re having random tariffs applied at the drop of a hat, the government is randomly meddling to pay off cronies. It seems like companies and investors taking a conservative approach would just be rational. What am I missing? You are seeing 10-15% declines in manufacturing industries in a lot of cases. That isn't enough to cause a crash in a service economy. | ||
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Jankisa
Croatia1317 Posts
Everything is vibes, there are no fundamentals and no one really knows why are things not falling apart. If you look at the GME saga and how stupid that whole thing was, and look at them now, they are still basically holding the price of $23 , that is above $130 given the dilution and give GME a market cap of 10.33 billion. That is 10 x of what it was worth before a random guy on the internet started pumping the stock. And it's been 5 years, retail went down, they closed up shop in Europe and Canada, fundamentals went way down, they are worth 10 x. Why? Well, memes, vibes, who knows. Tesla has a market cap of 1.44 trillion today, Toyota, the actual biggest car manufacturer in the world by volume of cars sold has 260 billion. Tesla had a very bad financial year, the stock just keeps on going up. It makes no sense. And then you have the AI boom which has people unloading dump trucks of cash for GPU-s and Data centers with 0 AI companies showing any plan to actually be profitable any time soon. At least they have the "well, maybe we get to AGI" trump card so it kind of makes sense, but in reality, it's fucking crazy. And don't get me started on Crypto, the "future of finance" where 10 + years after we still have 0 actual utility from this technology, but we do have it using up the same amount of energy as Vietnam and Bitcoin has the market cap of 2.2 trillion. Smart people like Buffet are divesting from tech into materials, real-estate and energy, everyone else is riding the vibes and I'm personally terrified of whatever the fuck comes because there's going to be a lot of desperate people when this shit crashes and burns. | ||
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Ryzel
United States547 Posts
On October 30 2025 01:05 ChristianS wrote: Something I don’t understand about the present moment is the macroeconomic picture. It’s been canonical wisdom for ages that Wall Street hates uncertainty, and that more than any particular policy, the economy benefits from *knowing what the policy will be* and suffers when things are mercurial. They’ve been mercurial all year, and worse, they’re almost certain to continue that way. Volatility is bad for a lot, but it’s great for insider trading, and there’s every reason to believe that people in the administration are profiting off every market swing caused by the administration’s own vacillation. So… why aren’t things worse? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think most people are optimistic about the economy right now. But if you were going to list things the White House could do to intentionally crater the economy, we’ve been watching a lot of them happen and so far it’s been, what, kind of a modest decline? I’ve seen the theory that it’s being buoyed by an AI bubble and the crash is still incoming, but even if that’s true, why don’t we see the contraction you’d expect in industries that have nothing to do with AI? I mean, they’re having random tariffs applied at the drop of a hat, the government is randomly meddling to pay off cronies. It seems like companies and investors taking a conservative approach would just be rational. What am I missing? The short version is that “the economy” is more and more concentrated in the uber-wealthy a.k.a. the insiders you’re describing, they have enough wealth to use financial tricks to boost their own stock values regardless of fundamentals, and they can use personal loans backed by their obscene market value to make purchases so they don’t ever need to sell their positions for liquidity. And contrary to what you’re saying, there has never been a more stable time for the uber-wealthy to thrive, because the government, which has historically been the only agency keeping them in check, has signaled loud and clear they’re on the same side now. The rich own the stocks, and there’s never been a better time to be a fat cat capitalist. There’s no reason for them to do anything but hodl diamond hands to the moon 💎 🙌🏻 🚀 🌕 | ||
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Ryzel
United States547 Posts
On October 29 2025 23:08 oBlade wrote: The reason to institutionalize people is if they can't function in society independently without constant felony recidivism, and they can't be imprisoned because that's cruel or because they're incompetent to stand trial, and they have no guardian or custodian other than the state, they need to be sequestered in some alternative way by the state, which represents all of us (who are Americans). It's not specifically about murder prevention. Like even if someone is only punching a random person in the head and torching a car every day, they need ejected whether or not their likelihood of killing someone meets some threshold. They've already removed themselves from society, we just have to make it official with physical relocation. Why not make it even more official with “spiritual relocation” and just shoot them? Honest question. | ||
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GreenHorizons
United States23794 Posts
On October 30 2025 01:05 ChristianS wrote: + Show Spoiler + Something I don’t understand about the present moment is the macroeconomic picture. It’s been canonical wisdom for ages that Wall Street hates uncertainty, and that more than any particular policy, the economy benefits from *knowing what the policy will be* and suffers when things are mercurial. They’ve been mercurial all year, and worse, they’re almost certain to continue that way. Volatility is bad for a lot, but it’s great for insider trading, and there’s every reason to believe that people in the administration are profiting off every market swing caused by the administration’s own vacillation. So… why aren’t things worse? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think most people are optimistic about the economy right now. But if you were going to list things the White House could do to intentionally crater the economy, we’ve been watching a lot of them happen and so far it’s been, what, kind of a modest decline? I’ve seen the theory that it’s being buoyed by an AI bubble and the crash is still incoming, but even if that’s true, why don’t we see the contraction you’d expect in industries that have nothing to do with AI? I mean, they’re having random tariffs applied at the drop of a hat, the government is randomly meddling to pay off cronies. The simple version is just that everyone conveniently forgot Greenspan's "revelatory" mistake/realization about capitalism. I discovered a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works. I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms Combined with the fact that the post WWII world order interconnected world economies under a hegemonic US and basically made the US "too big to fail" no matter how absurd it is to honest observers. The US economy is sorta like a Jenga tower in that it's still standing, but no one knows which block being pulled will be the one that turns the tower to rubble. But the only way to continue playing is to keep pulling. The issue for the world is they all live/depend on the Jenga tower. If it crumbles, they're likely to get buried in the rubble. So, for now, it's still in everyone's interest to keep the delusion alive no matter how ridiculous it gets (Jankissa highlighted some popular examples). | ||
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Gorsameth
Netherlands22190 Posts
On October 30 2025 01:05 ChristianS wrote: Wall street is not the economy. The stock market is not the economy. It used to be an indicator for the economy but very little about stocks are connected to reality these days (see Tesla just as the obvious example). Something I don’t understand about the present moment is the macroeconomic picture. It’s been canonical wisdom for ages that Wall Street hates uncertainty, and that more than any particular policy, the economy benefits from *knowing what the policy will be* and suffers when things are mercurial. They’ve been mercurial all year, and worse, they’re almost certain to continue that way. Volatility is bad for a lot, but it’s great for insider trading, and there’s every reason to believe that people in the administration are profiting off every market swing caused by the administration’s own vacillation. So… why aren’t things worse? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think most people are optimistic about the economy right now. But if you were going to list things the White House could do to intentionally crater the economy, we’ve been watching a lot of them happen and so far it’s been, what, kind of a modest decline? I’ve seen the theory that it’s being buoyed by an AI bubble and the crash is still incoming, but even if that’s true, why don’t we see the contraction you’d expect in industries that have nothing to do with AI? I mean, they’re having random tariffs applied at the drop of a hat, the government is randomly meddling to pay off cronies. It seems like companies and investors taking a conservative approach would just be rational. What am I missing? Companies want predictability but they can deal with batshit crazy chaos if they have to. Especially the big boys with deep pockets to cushion any problems arising from the chaos. They will perform less but the wheels don't stop turning. Some of America is doing 'ok', some of it isn't at all (like farmers as just another off the cuff example) and all of it would be doing a hell of a lot better if there was predictability instead of chaos. | ||
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oBlade
United States6002 Posts
On October 30 2025 00:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: oBlade, OECD countries typically have proportionally similar wealth, policies, and other first-world properties that the United States either has or strives to have, making them good points of comparison. It's silly to compare the United States to third-world countries or a global average. For those reasons, your comparison of the United States to Uganda, Nigeria, and Iraq is irrelevant. "Proportionally" doesn't hold in the real world. Things do not scale. Iceland is a great country. So's the US. You cannot run the US as though it were 850 Icelands stuck together or one Iceland blown up to 850x size. Comparing the US to Uganda was not the point of those sentences despite they contained the words US and Uganda. You know this. Points of disanalogy: Population, size, wealth distribution, democratic socialism, drug trade, revolving door felony recidivism. This is why you couldn't bring yourself to say the comparisons to Mexico and Brazil, which were actually comparisons, were irrelevant. On October 30 2025 00:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: And when you talk about using magic to make Americans less homicidal, you're implying that Americans are inherently more murderous (even without guns). Can't tell if this is dishonest or just misunderstanding. Similarly, if you reduce the temperature of your freezer, it implies the freezer was hot. If guns make people homicidal, imagine actually how extraordinarily well-behaved Americans are, considering that having half the guns in the entire world only made them average homicidal. On October 30 2025 00:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Please explain how you know that the suicide and homicide rates in this country wouldn't decrease if guns weren't around - that they would stay the same even without guns - despite the data showing how other first-world countries don't have this same violence issue that we have. You think that's what I said? Simplifying now: Magic wand -> Japan/Korea. Problem: Magic wand does not exist. Begin removing guns and citizens' rights without magic wand -> Get Mexico/Brazil level problems or worse, plus never become Japan/Korea "First-worldness" does not matter. You are using "first world" in a way that begs the question. In case you think begs the question means suggests a question to be asked, I'll rephrase: you are using "first world" in a way that circularizes your argument. If you exclude all the nations that are worse than the US on something, you found that the US is the worst. You're not picking based on the actual definition of first world because it's not the Cold War, otherwise South Africa and Brazil would 100% first world: market democracies aligned with the US. It's kind of like Mexico and Brazil and Nigeria, they don't count because they're too huge, chaotic, and so let's look down on them, and they're not first world so it doesn't matter, of course they have problems - which I disagree with. As though them just becoming "first world" would solve their issues. When your definition of first world is basically the issue being solved to begin with, which is circular. Yet there are comparably large countries like Malaysia and Indonesia who have nowhere near the homicide rates of the above. How certain parts of the world that are poorer and have less guns than the US (which is the entire world) manage to become either much more or much less violent than the US? Your insistence on viewing the US problem through a first-world (i.e., rich, European) lens presupposes that it can't be a third world problem just because the US is on balance first world. That's a dangerous assumption, because it rules out a very real possibility without ever considering it: That there is a separate third world growing inside the US. That the US, being far larger and broader in distribution than any of your Google-first-result-OECD-member comparisons, has segments or cross-sections of it which are most aptly analyzed as being third world and are more analogous to Mexico or Costa Rica than to Ireland or Spain. And should be approached from that perspective. Plus India which is one of only two countries bigger than the US, is definitely not proportionally wealthy yet manages half the homicide rate over a sampling of over a billion people. + Show Spoiler + I won't mention China for just not being able to believe any information from it at this point in history and anyway the system is not worth having a low homicide rate. On October 30 2025 00:30 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: After that, feel free to explain why the red, conservative, super-pro-gun states have higher mortality rates from guns than blue, liberal, gun-control states, because even within our own country we see the link between guns and gun deaths: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/state-stats/deaths/firearms.html "Mortality" meaning intentionally conflating suicide and homicide. I don't believe the fact that someone Hemingways or Cobains themselves, because we have a society that glorifies suicide and abandons men who represent 80% of suicides, means that the rest of us forfeit the natural right to defend ourselves and our families. So decouple homicide and suicide stats, and you suddenly realize Japan and Korea are not the ones we want to emulate, and the rest of your precious OECD doesn't look near as attractive anymore either with respect to suicide. | ||
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RenSC2
United States1083 Posts
On October 30 2025 01:39 Jankisa wrote: I think the stock market has been unglued from reality for quite a while now. Everything is vibes, there are no fundamentals and no one really knows why are things not falling apart. If you look at the GME saga and how stupid that whole thing was, and look at them now, they are still basically holding the price of $23 , that is above $130 given the dilution and give GME a market cap of 10.33 billion. That is 10 x of what it was worth before a random guy on the internet started pumping the stock. And it's been 5 years, retail went down, they closed up shop in Europe and Canada, fundamentals went way down, they are worth 10 x. Why? Well, memes, vibes, who knows. Tesla has a market cap of 1.44 trillion today, Toyota, the actual biggest car manufacturer in the world by volume of cars sold has 260 billion. Tesla had a very bad financial year, the stock just keeps on going up. It makes no sense. And then you have the AI boom which has people unloading dump trucks of cash for GPU-s and Data centers with 0 AI companies showing any plan to actually be profitable any time soon. At least they have the "well, maybe we get to AGI" trump card so it kind of makes sense, but in reality, it's fucking crazy. And don't get me started on Crypto, the "future of finance" where 10 + years after we still have 0 actual utility from this technology, but we do have it using up the same amount of energy as Vietnam and Bitcoin has the market cap of 2.2 trillion. Smart people like Buffet are divesting from tech into materials, real-estate and energy, everyone else is riding the vibes and I'm personally terrified of whatever the fuck comes because there's going to be a lot of desperate people when this shit crashes and burns. Yes. A stock price only has to come back to reality if a company wants to raise some capital. If a company can manage to break even, they don't need new capital, so they don't need to dilute the stock price. It's only when a company is losing money and needs a source of it that the stock price will be in jeopardy of dilution, which can tank the price. Until then, really odd valuations can be created and sustained. TSLA specifically is in a battle for control. Investors will vote on Elon Musk's 1 Trillion dollar pay package on Nov-6. Granted, it's investors as of Sep-15th (and Musk poured billions back into the company days before to get a larger vote, which created momentum that still hasn't abated), but both groups will probably hold their shares until after the vote. The funny thing is that the losing party may sell and destroy the share price, no matter which way the vote goes. Musk doesn't get his pay package? He may sell a shit ton of his shares as he exits the company, tanking the price. Musk does get his pay package? Institutional investors see how much value from the company is siphoned off to one man and may sell their shares, tanking the price. Then again, I could be totally wrong and the share price could skyrocket on dreams of Mecha-Hitler powered Tesla Robots in every home future. As I said, the price can do anything, so long as TSLA doesn't need to raise new money. Overall, I feel like our economy is Wile E Coyote over the abyss. We don't fall until we actually look down. However, there's no firm footing anymore and I'm not so sure we can get firm footing even if we stop now. There's some hope that we're just racing towards the abyss and not over it yet, but it may already be too late. With the threat of tariffs, a lot of consumers pushed up their discretionary spending to earlier in the year, juicing EPS numbers. Electric car purchases got pushed up to get ahead of the end of the tax incentive... they're going to get wrecked in Q4. In food, we're seeing massive inflation. People need to eat, so will cut down on all other spending. Health insurance premiums will go up starting Jan-1. People will find out how much starting Nov-1. People need to stay alive, so more money to health insurance and less to discretionary spending. Rural hospitals will also close with Medicare cuts, lots of skilled middle class people out of work. I think shit's about to get real, real soon, but so long as companies can cut costs to break even or better, the stock market can remain irrational indefinitely. | ||
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Hat Trick of Today
201 Posts
On October 30 2025 01:05 ChristianS wrote: Something I don’t understand about the present moment is the macroeconomic picture. It’s been canonical wisdom for ages that Wall Street hates uncertainty, and that more than any particular policy, the economy benefits from *knowing what the policy will be* and suffers when things are mercurial. They’ve been mercurial all year, and worse, they’re almost certain to continue that way. Volatility is bad for a lot, but it’s great for insider trading, and there’s every reason to believe that people in the administration are profiting off every market swing caused by the administration’s own vacillation. So… why aren’t things worse? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think most people are optimistic about the economy right now. But if you were going to list things the White House could do to intentionally crater the economy, we’ve been watching a lot of them happen and so far it’s been, what, kind of a modest decline? I’ve seen the theory that it’s being buoyed by an AI bubble and the crash is still incoming, but even if that’s true, why don’t we see the contraction you’d expect in industries that have nothing to do with AI? I mean, they’re having random tariffs applied at the drop of a hat, the government is randomly meddling to pay off cronies. It seems like companies and investors taking a conservative approach would just be rational. What am I missing? But you are seeing the contraction right now aren’t you? The job market is absolutely cooked in the US right now between most companies freezing hiring and the overall lack of employment opportunities. If there are jobs, the quality has also generally declined. The whole government went through a whole scandal over firing people who published negative job market figures because it’s spooking people and impacting sentiment. There’s definitely conservative behaviour afoot, the price of gold has spiked because people do not feel comfortable about the current economic situation. The GDP figures, which generally still show growth, don't really agree with how dire the on-the-ground situation is. Thats because the growth is in the AI bubble where you have things like the nVidia-Oracle-OpenAI circlejerk promise hundreds of billions of investments into each other and data centers. That is also still encouraging spending from the top 10% because objectively they’re the only ones seeing huge net wealth gains right now and therefore still feel comfortable spending. But even then there’s definitely some desperation from the AI businesses, see OpenAI allowing erotica on their platform despite previously mocking Grok for the same actions. | ||
Liquid`Drone
Norway28781 Posts
It's the organization for economic development. Not Utopia Nations. The US constantly grows GDP and employment and trade, like these other countries that share the same goal, but unlike them it's also leaving some people behind, causing the persistence of a dangerous criminal underclass with anxious people who go postal? That's fine and could make sense. It just has nothing to do with gun control. I think this makes sense as an explanation for why the US sees more crazy people who have a desire to go on a rampage to kill as many people as possible than other countries that are 'economically comparable' to it, and it's a valid reason why comparing the murder rate in scandinavian countries with the US and attributing the difference to 'gun control' really doesn't hold true. But there is one European country which is more similar to the US than other european countries are - and this is the UK. In the past decade, there have been numerous incidents - I can count 22 from this wikipedia page , where some crazy person (and in one instance, people) seemingly tried to murder as many people as possible. However, as you can see from that link, in these 22 incidents the assailants were only able to get hold of knives as their weapon of choice, and in the worst incident, three armed assailants (this one was islamic terrorism) went around stabbing unarmed people in a market place, killing 6 people and wounding 48. The total death count from those 22 incidents is 29, the injury count is 135. Like, I'm on board with the Charlie Kirk argument that 'as a society we need to accept some unfortunate deaths as a consequence of upholding the first amendment', and I'm on board with a sort of, argument that mass shootings actually comprise a fraction of gun deaths and they get undue attention for that reason - 58% of american gun deaths are suicides, mass shooting numbers vary a bit depending on definition but seems they're certainly fewer than 1000 per year, whereas 'regular murder by firearm' numbers are like 18k. But the idea that there's no relationship between people being massacred by crazy people with firearms and the availability of firearms is obvious bs. | ||
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DarkPlasmaBall
United States45431 Posts
On October 30 2025 03:00 oBlade wrote: "Proportionally" doesn't hold in the real world. Things do not scale. Iceland is a great country. So's the US. You cannot run the US as though it were 850 Icelands stuck together or one Iceland blown up to 850x size. Comparing the US to Uganda was not the point of those sentences despite they contained the words US and Uganda. You know this. Points of disanalogy: Population, size, wealth distribution, democratic socialism, drug trade, revolving door felony recidivism. This is why you couldn't bring yourself to say the comparisons to Mexico and Brazil, which were actually comparisons, were irrelevant. On your explanation of proportionality working or not: you can't have it both ways... Mexico is 1/3 of the population of the United States, so you'd still need to scale the data proportionally. I'm fine with including Mexico in the discussion, but not because it's big. If you're going to say a country is too small to matter, that's something you need to defend and not cherry-pick. You're asserting that "things do not scale" unless they're your examples. I think characteristics other than population size can also be important, which is why dismissing a country for being small could be short-sighted. Can't tell if this is dishonest or just misunderstanding. Similarly, if you reduce the temperature of your freezer, it implies the freezer was hot. If guns make people homicidal, imagine actually how extraordinarily well-behaved Americans are, considering that having half the guns in the entire world only made them average homicidal. You think that's what I said? Simplifying now: Magic wand -> Japan/Korea. Problem: Magic wand does not exist. Begin removing guns and citizens' rights without magic wand -> Get Mexico/Brazil level problems or worse, plus never become Japan/Korea Citizens do not have the right to commit gun violence. It would also be constitutional for the Constitution to be amended, and certain gun control laws could absolutely be legal too. Also, you'd need to back up the serious assertion that without private citizens owning guns, the United States would have new problems similar to Mexico and Brazil. We would still have law enforcement and the military. "First-worldness" does not matter. You are using "first world" in a way that begs the question. In case you think begs the question means suggests a question to be asked, I'll rephrase: you are using "first world" in a way that circularizes your argument. If you exclude all the nations that are worse than the US on something, you found that the US is the worst. You're not picking based on the actual definition of first world because it's not the Cold War, otherwise South Africa and Brazil would 100% first world: market democracies aligned with the US. It's kind of like Mexico and Brazil and Nigeria, they don't count because they're too huge, chaotic, and so let's look down on them, and they're not first world so it doesn't matter, of course they have problems - which I disagree with. As though them just becoming "first world" would solve their issues. When your definition of first world is basically the issue being solved to begin with, which is circular. Yet there are comparably large countries like Malaysia and Indonesia who have nowhere near the homicide rates of the above. How certain parts of the world that are poorer and have less guns than the US (which is the entire world) manage to become either much more or much less violent than the US? Your insistence on viewing the US problem through a first-world (i.e., rich, European) lens presupposes that it can't be a third world problem just because the US is on balance first world. That's a dangerous assumption, because it rules out a very real possibility without ever considering it: That there is a separate third world growing inside the US. That the US, being far larger and broader in distribution than any of your Google-first-result-OECD-member comparisons, has segments or cross-sections of it which are most aptly analyzed as being third world and are more analogous to Mexico or Costa Rica than to Ireland or Spain. And should be approached from that perspective. Plus India which is one of only two countries bigger than the US, is definitely not proportionally wealthy yet manages half the homicide rate over a sampling of over a billion people. + Show Spoiler + I won't mention China for just not being able to believe any information from it at this point in history and anyway the system is not worth having a low homicide rate. It's not my definition of a first-world country. I didn't invent the term, and I referred to the OECD list, which is also not defined circularly. I'm not circularly defining any countries as better (vs. worse) than the United States. First-world countries are countries "with a well-functioning democratic system with little prospects of political risk, in addition to a strong rule of law, a capitalist economy with economic stability, and a relatively high mean standard of living. Various ways in which these metrics are assessed are through the examination of a country's GDP, GNP, literacy rate, life expectancy, and Human Development Index.[1]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World You can feel free to (circularly) assert that European countries would hypothetically have more problems if we gave them tons of crime, but that only acknowledges that they don't currently have some of the problems that the United States and Mexico have (according to you). One of those problems is an exceedingly high murder rate per capita, which brings it back to the original topic of gun violence. "Mortality" meaning intentionally conflating suicide and homicide. I don't believe the fact that someone Hemingways or Cobains themselves, because we have a society that glorifies suicide and abandons men who represent 80% of suicides, means that the rest of us forfeit the natural right to defend ourselves and our families. So decouple homicide and suicide stats, and you suddenly realize Japan and Korea are not the ones we want to emulate, and the rest of your precious OECD doesn't look near as attractive anymore either with respect to suicide. If you look at the U.S. homicide rate, it's significantly higher than the other countries I mentioned except for Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate We don't need to conflate suicide and homicide, though on the topic of suicide: "Because of the high likelihood of death in any suicide attempt involving firearms, the potential utility of means restriction in suicide prevention efforts is clear. Previous research has supported the notion that restricting access to firearms is associated with reduced suicide rates both in the United States7,8 and abroad.9 Means restriction can take many forms, including microlevel approaches, such as family members removing a gun from the home, and macrolevel approaches, such as legislation that delays or prevents the acquisition of a gun. Firearms legislation is a politically charged issue; however, previous research has demonstrated that laws restricting access to firearms are associated with a reduction in firearms suicides10–12 and in the overall suicide rate13–15 in the United States." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4566524/ So yes, removing guns would not only reduce the homicide rate, but it would also reduce the suicide rate. People contemplating homicide or suicide would be less likely to commit homicide or suicide, if they didn't have access to guns. | ||
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ChristianS
United States3304 Posts
To Jankisa and Gorsameth’s points, it’s certainly a mistake to look at the behavior of day traders as an indication of economic health. No argument from me there. It is interesting to me, though, that corporations with nominal expertise in a certain field don’t act more rationally. They’re the ones that make or lose money depending on how things go, right? If you’re importing raw materials from China or something, and you have no way of knowing whether there will be a 200% tariff by the time they arrive, it seems like you’d have no choice but to scale back your business and/or raise prices – not just to account for tariffs already in place, but to mitigate the risk of future vacillations to your business. To Ryzel and GH’s points, maybe sufficient decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of rent-seekers who make money regardless of actual economic production that it doesn’t matter to them if the underlying businesses remain profitable. I still don’t understand why that doesn’t result in those businesses being affected in a more obvious way, but again, my head is going fuzzy just thinking about it. There certainly is a Wile E Coyote feel to the thing, but as in the cartoon (and being a physical scientist by training) I don’t comprehend what force is actually providing the buoyancy, even temporarily. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26498 Posts
On October 30 2025 07:00 ChristianS wrote: Lots of interesting responses, thanks everyone. I’ve said before that my head goes fuzzy when I try to think about the financial system, and it’s still true, so I appreciate having some other minds who maybe understand how to think about it better than I do. To Jankisa and Gorsameth’s points, it’s certainly a mistake to look at the behavior of day traders as an indication of economic health. No argument from me there. It is interesting to me, though, that corporations with nominal expertise in a certain field don’t act more rationally. They’re the ones that make or lose money depending on how things go, right? If you’re importing raw materials from China or something, and you have no way of knowing whether there will be a 200% tariff by the time they arrive, it seems like you’d have no choice but to scale back your business and/or raise prices – not just to account for tariffs already in place, but to mitigate the risk of future vacillations to your business. To Ryzel and GH’s points, maybe sufficient decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of rent-seekers who make money regardless of actual economic production that it doesn’t matter to them if the underlying businesses remain profitable. I still don’t understand why that doesn’t result in those businesses being affected in a more obvious way, but again, my head is going fuzzy just thinking about it. There certainly is a Wile E Coyote feel to the thing, but as in the cartoon (and being a physical scientist by training) I don’t comprehend what force is actually providing the buoyancy, even temporarily. Wile E Coyote is rather a good example. He’ll run off a cliff into thin air some 20 metres, and he’ll only be subject to the force of gravity when he notices. Belief is the buoyancy. I think what complicates things further, minus the sheer scale of it, is that to some degree these systems model organic phenomena, things that would happen in almost any economic system, alongside kind of more artificial constructs. And unpicking the two is tricky. It seems the whole shebang is actively stupider than it used to be. But perhaps it ain’t, the Tulip bubble and all that. But at least the Tulip bubble was predicated on ‘everyone loves tulips right?’, it was a profitable market that ended up insanely oversaturated and collapsed. Tesla’s valuation? To me is just bonkers. Tesla being overvalued versus revenue when they actually had a big leg-up tech wise, that makes sense in terms of future potential. Now? Tesla never established dominance in its sector, and indeed other companies have caught up. Companies that sell more cars and have advantages in terms of their sheer scale. Crypto? I mean it’s fundamentally flawed, you can make money off it, but it’s always going to be a winner/loser proposition and not any kind of transformative tech. We’re in the AI bubble now, and that’s obviously going to be valuable tech, but how valuable? To this point, it’s been a huge loss leading/disruptive endeavour, but how do we actually collectively leverage it, or indeed make it profitable? There’s all sorts of wonkiness floating around these days to me, but I’m not any kind of knowledgable person on these kind of topics, so I absolutely dig the posts from those who are | ||
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Hat Trick of Today
201 Posts
On October 30 2025 07:00 ChristianS wrote:To Jankisa and Gorsameth’s points, it’s certainly a mistake to look at the behavior of day traders as an indication of economic health. No argument from me there. It is interesting to me, though, that corporations with nominal expertise in a certain field don’t act more rationally. They’re the ones that make or lose money depending on how things go, right? If you’re importing raw materials from China or something, and you have no way of knowing whether there will be a 200% tariff by the time they arrive, it seems like you’d have no choice but to scale back your business and/or raise prices – not just to account for tariffs already in place, but to mitigate the risk of future vacillations to your business. But the thing is that businesses are largely behaving rationally. And the economic policy of the Trump administration as of right now is actually very predictable. For the most part, most businesses have responded to the economic climate and uncertainty by stockpiling stock and basically doing nothing else. No major investments, no additional hires. That’s seen in the absolutely cooked jobs market. For businesses like Apple who have large enough weight to influence government, you can buy a dinner with Trump to get the government to carve out exemptions on stuff like finished assembled goods from China. In such a situation, you’re actually ahead of the competition. You get stock in before tariffs hit, your opposition don’t have the same crystal ball. The Trump Administration being big into quid pro quo arrangements and the legal apparatus basically ruling that this is very fine and very OK is an absolute dream for high value individuals who are doing everything in their power to consolidate industries. Businesses that can abuse the current situation are behaving extremely rationally by ramming through everything they can get away with. This is the whole K shaped economy people are talking about. Between inflation and the trade situation, it’s functionally a recession for 90% of people in America and, like I said, we’re seeing this in the job numbers and consumer spending. The 10% of the wealthiest individuals are the sole peoples carrying things like consumer spending and that is largely fuelled by tech multinationals using an infinite money glitch in the system. The minute OpenAI, which is the 1/3rd of the infinite money glitch that is most likely to face financial hardship, can’t deliver the promised investments is when everything collapses because that’s when the top 10% start keeping their pocketbooks closed. | ||
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MJG
United Kingdom1450 Posts
On October 30 2025 05:44 Liquid`Drone wrote: Oblade wrote I think this makes sense as an explanation for why the US sees more crazy people who have a desire to go on a rampage to kill as many people as possible than other countries that are 'economically comparable' to it, and it's a valid reason why comparing the murder rate in scandinavian countries with the US and attributing the difference to 'gun control' really doesn't hold true. But there is one European country which is more similar to the US than other european countries are - and this is the UK. In the past decade, there have been numerous incidents - I can count 22 from this wikipedia page , where some crazy person (and in one instance, people) seemingly tried to murder as many people as possible. However, as you can see from that link, in these 22 incidents the assailants were only able to get hold of knives as their weapon of choice, and in the worst incident, three armed assailants (this one was islamic terrorism) went around stabbing unarmed people in a market place, killing 6 people and wounding 48. The total death count from those 22 incidents is 29, the injury count is 135. Like, I'm on board with the Charlie Kirk argument that 'as a society we need to accept some unfortunate deaths as a consequence of upholding the first amendment', and I'm on board with a sort of, argument that mass shootings actually comprise a fraction of gun deaths and they get undue attention for that reason - 58% of american gun deaths are suicides, mass shooting numbers vary a bit depending on definition but seems they're certainly fewer than 1000 per year, whereas 'regular murder by firearm' numbers are like 18k. But the idea that there's no relationship between people being massacred by crazy people with firearms and the availability of firearms is obvious bs. The US (~0.52 knife murders per 100,000 people) is worse for knife-based murders than the UK (~0.35 knife murders per 100,000 people) despite the fact that guns are readily available in the US. When you look at murders generally then the US (~5.7 murders per 100,000 people) has a much worse murder rate than the UK (~0.95 murders per 100,000 people). Don't try and compare the two lmao. EDIT: But I do agree that it's clearly a societal problem. Americans would kill each other at elevated rates even if all they had were boards with nails in them, and you just know that someone would make a big show out of having even bigger boards with even bigger nails...  | ||
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