US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5386

On December 17 2025 01:01 Doublemint wrote:
Spinal Tap is pretty legendary, I am definitely going to check out Spinal Tap 2 at some point.

On December 17 2025 01:31 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
The Princess Bride is a legendary movie as well. Eternally quotable.

On December 16 2025 14:06 oBlade wrote:

Your youtube short gets it wrong from the very beginning by framing Trump as being "off-topic" in a 90 minute speech where he, the most powerful person in the world, is the main attraction and can talk about whatever topic he wants. The point about steel is not that America families should buy steel instead of dolls. It's that his policies broadly have helped US steel through the tariffs against China and Chinese steel - whether true or important or not, it's not a hard point to understand what his goal is after he has railed against Chinese steel for decades. The real strength of the economy is more likely to be tied to core industry.

Like who can't admit there is a problem with unrestrained consumerism - there are definitely things that it's more important to be able to afford than Chinesium toys. For example the price of homes is down year over year, and new homes are cheaper than resale homes for the first time in a long time. Another of his common points, which was in this speech, too - the actual speech not just the popcorn 20 seconds of it - is cheaper oil/gas means cheaper energy, which is the root of everything's affordability.

There is nothing wrong with the idea of raising emissions standards. Obviously you need to take a second look at the method if the result is the opposite of intended.

Why would companies benefit from making cars that you say are more expensive, reducing demand for their own products and allowing someone to undercut them with a cheaper and better car?

Miles per gallon have improved, and CO2 per mile have improved. According to regulatory standards of the last decade. This didn't happen from car companies not doing any design work.

The reason the trucks have gotten bigger is how the standards are regulated. They are not regulated by engine displacement (CCs), cylinders, or horsepower. (There are separate standards based on fuel like diesel vs. gas but that's it.) They are regulated by the 2D size of the car. The footprint of the car. The problem with this genius framework is any engine can be in any sized car.

Why is this less than ideal? Imagine you want to reduce the amount of cholesterol in pizzas, so you set standards for how much cholesterol can be in each size pizza (M, L, XL, etc.). This indirectly constrains the maximum amount of cheese you can put on each pizza.

Counterpoint: There are customers who like extra cheese.

Because of your cholesterol standards, the pizza shop must either reduce the cholesterol in cheese (intractable after a certain point) in order to add more cheese, or they can just sell bigger pizzas which are allowed to have more cholesterol.

This is not the company's fault. It's the fault of the people who passed standards without thinking through higher-order consequences. People would buy medium extra-extra-cheese pizzas if they weren't illegal, but instead they buy XL regular cheese pizzas because that's the only way to get that amount of cheese, which they want.

In trucks, they want the capability, the horsepower, the torque, the towing, etc., of the extra cheese. They don't particularly care how big the pie is. They would just as soon buy a less mega-sized truck, like they did 20-30 years ago, with the same engine, which is cheaper for everyone because it's smaller and therefore uses less raw materials in the body (The trucks you derided companies for lazily designing to be more expensive are more expensive because they're bigger, and bigger vehicles use more metal). But government problem-solving has brought us here. So you end up with Canyoneros that are like 20% bed.

On December 13 2025 14:33 Zambrah wrote:


What a delightfully perfect encapsulation of a truly American mindset.

On December 17 2025 01:50 GreenHorizons wrote:
I didn't realize that Jack Nicholson improvised the "You can't handle the truth!" line. I suspect Hegseth imagines himself something like like Jack's character.

On December 17 2025 04:27 ASoo wrote:

Is this really uniquely American?

I get that applying this kind of arms-race mentality to car size, specifically, fits American stereotypes. But the underlying mindset of "I'm in competition with everyone else, so I'm going to maximize the thing that makes me win that competition, even though it results in a wasteful Red Queen's race from a system-wide perspective" is pretty universal. Like, isn't this the same tendency that underlies IR realism?

On December 17 2025 05:05 Velr wrote:
the US. The whole lone rider/cowboy/maverick/"me above all" --> extreme individualism seems very american.

On December 17 2025 05:15 KwarK wrote:
Cruel individualism is America’s dominant religion, though some sects like to clothe it in borrowed monotheistic imagery.

On December 17 2025 05:10 JimmyJRaynor wrote:

can be true of american atheists. i don't know if it is true for americans who are more religious though.

Ayn Rand wrote the individualists bible for America atheists in the middle of the 20th century.

On December 17 2025 04:06 dyhb wrote:
The root of the problem is that Trump does ramble, and the people who want the gist of Trump's speech points are going to have it filtered through quotes and not through watching all 90 minutes. So that's an opportunity for MSNOW (formerly MSNBC) to put a partisan filter and mislead through selective omission. Did Trump hit affordability in a meaningful way, but also give some pretty canned talking points about consumerism? You won't know from an MSNOW clip.

Trump does suffer from simultaneously trying to say "The economy is doing great because of my tariffs and economic management decisions" and "Here's what I'm going to do to fix affordability." This is my summary of around two or three weeks of his economic messages. Really, tariffs were and are hurting affordability. Inflation continues to rise. It's fundamentally a politically losing message because of how inflation hurts families, which aren't helped by hearing about the evils of consumerism or how steel is doing. They might be helped in the future if Trump reduces tariffs and relies on cheaper energy production through his policies.

You go on to explain what you mean by this, but let me state for the record that there is something wrong with the idea of raising emissions standards. You can raise them to a level that isn't justified by current vehicle technology and design costs. You can make reasonably efficient trucks and SUVs illegal by pursuing very high targets. There is nothing wrong with a modest baseline efficiency standard, but there is something wrong in considering the idea of just raising the standard as a pure good.

You are right on all of this. The cheaper, smaller cars and trucks that would've met their needs were made illegal. Congratulations for pushing consumers towards bigger and heavier, which company advertising teams deftly sold.