The "previous guy" was constrained by a once-in-a-lifetime Congress that was serious about deficits, and he also benefited by another once-in-a-lifetime spurt of economic growth that dramatically increased tax revenue.
As soon as Congress realized they'd been handed a deficit-free budget they went about spending with wild abandon.
And anyway, since that guy we've had two presidents over three terms where the other party controlled the presidency and they didn't and they certainly didn't break the pattern.
Let me ask you this: If you wanted to vote for a guy (or gal) who was serious about reducing the deficit instead of someone who doesn't care as long as the wheels don't come off during his term, who would you vote for?
Here's the better question: If you were serious about reducing the deficit, what would you cut?
It should be possible to reduce Medicare costs significantly by going after healthcare costs in general, i.e. create a ton of new medical residency slots and train a lot of new doctors, and make the healthcare companies actually compete with each other. The AMA and healthcare companies are going to fight you hard.
We currently make large social security payments to affluent retirees who paid in less than we're paying them out. We could reform the system to cost less, i.e. not pay out as much to people who don't need the money. The AARP isn't going to like it.
The DoD budget is pretty big and a lot of it is waste or corruption. But to do this well you have to be good at identifying which parts, you still can't eliminate all of it because some of it is pretty important, and this one is the smallest of the three. And the defense contractors will try to stop you.
To make a meaningful dent in the deficit you would have to do at least two of those but no one is willing to do any of them.
Agreed. This should have been addressed decades ago, and every year that goes buy it will get harder to deal with.
Me, I'd cut everything. Right now, when interest rates are relatively low, we're spending more to service the debt than we're spending on defense. This isn't a problem we can address with half measures.
The giant sacred cows are Defence (War) and Social Security. Could probably solve the deficit pretty quickly by getting money out of politics, especially defence contractor and AIPAC money.
That would require a significant political overhaul though.
While we're at it, when did central banks start to buy lots of gold and under which POTUS? Could it have something to do with the freezing of hundreds of billions of some sovereign assets?
There is something awfully bad happening to the internet, including Hacker News.
It seems like rage-baiting, polarizing titles and vibe based comments are being upvoted, with no interest in the facts. For example, in this case:
1. The growth of the gold reserve in comparison to US Treasuries have very little to do with growth in gold acquisition, and has everything to do with gold more than doubling in price in a year.
2. To make it even worse, gold has since fluctuated in value, and treasuries overtook gold momentarily just a week ago. These price fluctuations has nothing to do with geopolitics.
3. Central bank buying of gold has been trending down in the last year, down 21% from 2024. So far in 2026 it's been going even lower.
4. Gold owned by central banks was higher than US treasuries in the 90s (this is mentioned in the article at least).
This is a little meta - but the thing that bothers me is that this low quality discussion like in this thread is spreading everywhere with the same mechanism - bring politics and polarization into every place, no matter how tangentially related it is.
Side stepping a little, but the Twitter and Reddit exoduses brought in a lot of people with established culture and communication dynamics at discrete periods. I considered writing an extension that collapses comments of accounts based on keywords and creation date, but ultimately decided that was regressive.
I think it's important to recognize how much the world has changed in a short period of time. HN was created when SV was unique, a large fraction of the globe was not on the internet, and web tech was new and novel. Everyone was still figuring out how to handle outreach and networking (I was positive it was a scam when the Omiyadar Network cold contacted me - "who does that?"). Today, I meet kids who made their first commits at the same age I was just trying to find friends in town who had computers. Now, our advanced is their common, and they're growing up primed for engagement-forward networking and self-promotion.
HN isn't a calcified relic of the era when it was created, it's a product of its people. We're seeing the new generations connecting from all over the world at a time when the foundational HNers are fading away, and sometimes when there's friction with my expectations of civility and etiquette in discourse and it feels like the noise is drowning out the signal and I yearn for the smaller, quieter days, I take that as my queue that I need to step back and appreciate that this is their time, too.
I think there are less experts on HN than years ago or a decade ago. And the culture of HN is getting slightly changing to a more Reddit culture every year.
It’s too bad because it’s the only place I know where you have experts in tech but also in other industries. And where I got very interesting discussions.
There's unfortunately someone who is posting some HN articles in a hackernews subreddit. I think that's contributed to the rise of Mr. Hot Take One-Liner Mic Drop, that posts something with 20 one liner replies, always at the top. If that continues happening I'm out.
One interesting factoid, since I can remember on HN, if you ever likened a conversation to Reddit they'd downvote you to grey. There are two ways to read that - Reddit is fine, don't criticize it; Reddit is embarrassing, don't diminish the conversation by comparing us to it.
Thanks appreciate the broader context in this post. As to your meta comment, besides bots, I think a lot of people are facing a great deal of pain and fear. They're emotional and even in hn a critical mass has switched to reading and writing with their gut. Good vibe project, analyse the level of emotionality in comments over time, I'd bet it's gone vertical in the past few months.
I agree with your "sensationalism is bad" take; especially as meaningful, non-incendiary comments now often get quickly downvoted for viewpoint, not tone (IMO downvoting should cost 0.1-0.3 karma). But not with "nothing to see in CB gold holdings fluctuations" view:
R1. But central bank gold holdings are rising organically, and partially at the expense of US treasuries. CB gold holdings have been dropping for 35 years, until about 2015. The price rise of gold from 2005 to 2015 did not reverse this trend. From 2015 to 2019 gold price did not rise, but reported holdings did. The recent doubling of the gold price muddies things a little, but the trend is clear.
R3. Reported gold purchases have trended down in 2025 and 2026, probably due to price doubling. But they are still positive. Emerging markets did not sell into this strength to build up more liquid holdings (UST) as more effective tools to support their economies against future malaise. Even "trending down" part is muddy, too, because some countries CB do not report it. China, an elephant in the room, started better obfuscating its holdings, including gold, since COVID.
R4. Yes. Gold owned by CB strognly trended down since 1980. That trend stopped in 2005 and reversed somewhere between 2005 and 2015. And likely accelerated in the last few years.
As a side note, I personally see USTs losing dominance as a reserve asset as a good thing. USG needs some checks on its spending, and world being willing to buy long dated treasuries at below inflation rates incentivizes the "we do not need to solve real problems, we can just print more money" mindset. My 2c.
Well, having tracked soft-science experts for 30 years, I have to say they're wrong over 50% of the time. Moreso, if it's coming from media that's owned by the same country that is causing evil.
>everything to do with gold more than doubling in price in a year.
Gold's price doesn't change, it's 42 2/9 US Dollar per fine troy ounce[1], and has been since 1973.
The problem is that this exchange rate hasn't been enforced, or adjusted since then. This allows the spot price to set the effective price of the dollar in a reciprocal arraignment.
Since, the "Gold Window" was closed by executive order, I posit that, In theory, Donald Trump could get a bunch of conspirators together, with 10.4 Billion in cash (the "Book Value" of the US Gold Reserves), and direct the Secretary of the Treasury to re-open the gold window, in private, and drain the US reserves, personally.
Edit: Nope... the law changed, thank goodness.
If the US somehow re-anchored the Dollar to Gold, the deflationary collapse would crush the economy everywhere, instantly, as all dollars outstanding would increase in real value by a factor of >100, and all debts would crush most people, companies, and economies.
So, realistically, if we wanted to re-anchor the dollar, the new value would have to be greater than the current spot price. To fully back all dollars outstanding, it would be somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 US Dollars per fine ounce.
I had previously expected this to happen a generation from now, but thanks to the complete collapse of institutional memory, and the current administration, I now expect it to happen before the end of the next administration.
Everything is politics. Which makes people who want to avoid it look delusional.
As for polarization that's been the modus operandi in my country for at least 500 years.
Everyone hates everyone but the alternative was the French, English or Spanish so what can you do?
Turns out you actually really don't need to love your neighbour.
This is mentioned often, but is also such a broad generalization that it is not constructive in any meaningful way. If everything is politics, then it can be eliminated from both sides of the equation. Focus on real and immediate problems at hand and providing concrete solutions need not have "politics" label slapped onto it by default, esp. where the ideological infighting this attracts complicates having open and frank discussions based on the facts. "Politics" has become a weaponised word often used to derail good initiatives, and with great success. The mindset that everything is politics may be contributor to that.
This is just HN. We're explicitly not productive or constructive. We're not solving the world's problems. We're just shooting the shit. This is a forum for wasting time. I guess it wouldn't be HN without the delusions of self-importance.
Everything you want to be politics is politics. Caring for other people shouldn't be politics. Being a decent human being shouldn't be politics. There are plenty of things that aren't politics unless you decide you want to turn them into politics.
The issue is when you get down to the edge cases, you get into politics again.
Is ‘caring’ (what does that mean exactly?) for someone on death row good or bad? You’ll likely find splits in answers along ‘political’ lines, especially depending on things like the nature of the crime, who the victim was, etc.
Is ‘caring’ (again, in what way?) for someone in Palestine good or bad? Or worth how much money to do? Similar split. How about Iran?
What about someone in the inner cities? Who doesn’t work?
Etc.
Hand wavy general statements are easy to have, but when it gets down to actual implementation is when real groups of people start to have very different concrete opinions on how it should be done.
You’ll also find lots of shaming among the group and against ‘outsiders’ trying to enforce idealogy. And if you think that part doesn’t happen, just read your own comment - it’s a mild form of that!
caring: (adjective) displaying kindness and concern for others.
If you look at this definition of caring and find a way to turn it into a politics issue that's your problem, not mine.
If you scale a problem up, then yes, you get into politics. If you scale it all the way down, politics disappear. If you see your next-door neighbor struggling with something and you can help, you should. That's not politics. That's called being a decent human being.
> Hand wavy general statements are easy to have
I agree. In fact "everything is politics" is a stupid, hand wavy statement.
> You’ll also find lots of shaming among the group and against ‘outsiders’ trying to enforce idealogy. And if you think that part doesn’t happen, just read your own comment - it’s a mild form of that!
Disagreement != enforcing ideology, at least in my world. And if you don't see it that way, then I guess you're guilty of doing the precise thing you're commenting on.
Under that definition, ‘Caring’ can mean anything from hopes and prayers to major economic sacrifices.
With that struggling neighbor, are you talking about helping them take out their trash at night when they’re tired - or paying unemployment benefits for years?
Notably, in my experience, the ones who talk the most usually just keep talking - and aren’t the ones on the hook for actually doing the hard caregiving when things are really tough. But hey, maybe you’re different?
One big difference we have here is you’re again talking hand waving generalities, and I’m talking concrete economic behaviors and policy. It’s easy to say ‘if you can help you should’, it’s harder when it’s ’where is the line for “can” and “should” exactly when we’re talking millions of people and trillions of dollars’, and people you’ll likely never meet in your life - and taxes that definitely come out of your paycheck each month.
Move the line too much one way, and it incentivizes being a victim. Move it too much the other way, and it crushes people with legitimate problems. Both are real issues.
One less conspiratorial but more pernicious angle, is that attacking things that are good but complex is a great strategy for troll politicians who don't care about the success of their country but just like the attention.
See Brexit, and free trade in general.
It's a good way to get "the establishment" to gang up on you and defend something complicated while you present simple but wrong alternatives and promise the world.
I also think he's up for sale (as are all the other similar politicians) to a multitude of buyers, foreign and domestic.
For Brexit in particular, it seems clear to me that EU politicians, but the UK ones in particular, used EU as a scapegoat for unpopular economic policy that they themselves actually want, but can't justify effectively to their constituents. "We can't help it, it's an EU requirement" when leaving out that in the EU, their guys totally supported it.
That was bound to backfire at some point or another.
I think you're right that politicians prefer not to defend complicated (and possibly good) policy to the public. But if they choose easy ways out to avoid it (and they do!) then they're to blame too when it collapses. To blame the public for not blindly trusting them won't do.
The public is almost fully to blame, and gets the government it deserves. I only hedge a little because education is in control of the state, so to some degree people don't choose whether to be educated on the relevant matters.
It may be familiarity breeding contempt but I find members of the British public in particular very myopic in obtaining benefits for 'their group'. There's very little interest in society as a whole.
Politicians simply bend in order not to upset any of the key voting blocs. But you understand that's a selection bias: you wouldn't exist as a successful politician if you didn't do this. All those who go another path are doomed to obscurity.
> The public is almost fully to blame, and gets the government it deserves.
Which has been a popular argument against democracy since at least Plato: just look at the average voter/person and their intelligence, understanding of the world, and their character.
> The public is almost fully to blame, and gets the government it deserves.
I'd frame this another way -- the public are largely responsible, but we put all the blame on politicians/government. we vote for these people while we all know they're all talking complete and utter nonsense just to get past the job interview. it is the game. i wish it wasn't. i wish i could stand in the house of commons during PMQs and point out every BS line every single one of them says. stand up during question time and shout at all the idiots on the panel, disproving every single bullshit line they've fed the audience with stats and analysis and data [0]. but then we'd probably end up everyone in the country showing up to PMQs/question time shouting over each other all at the same time... which wouldn't really work lol.
the system is not perfect, but it's what we've got.
> I only hedge a little because education is in control of the state, so to some degree people don't choose whether to be educated on the relevant matters.
> It may be familiarity breeding contempt but I find members of the British public in particular very myopic in obtaining benefits for 'their group'. There's very little interest in society as a whole.
yeah, like, i'm kind of lucky that i don't have children or any other dependants and i went to posh schools, got a decent academic education [1]. i can afford to sit around, pontificate and moralise about what the large scale right or wrong way of doing things should be. i earn enough and don't have kids. hell, i'd be happy if they increased the rate of tax in the top bands. more money to spend on public services for everyone else who actually needs it. seriously, take my spare disposable income! i'm only gonna spend it on expensive food and cigarettes that's gonna make me overweight and have lung cancer and become a drain on the nhs anyway!
my mate with three kids doesn't have the time for that. she just wants the school to give her daughter the help she needs and has to fight through a bunch of bureaucracy to get there. bureaucracy which exists because the system is under strain because lots of people are asking for the same resources and they've got to figure out some way of apportioning out the resources. same with my mate who is a single parent to a son with pretty hefty ADHD. it's no wonder they fall into the "my group first" attitude and/or rhetoric with, for example, immigration. they're constantly told there's all this money is being spent elsewhere on "some other people" and then they look at their kid's school struggling with one support worker for hundreds of kids and it's like ... well, wtf. same thing with income taxes etc. "we need money for our kids, why on earth is my tax money being spent on X, Y, Z" etc.
to be clear: i don't agree with the political views of my friend, and i don't really care to debate the politics either. i'm responding to the "myopic" comment from my own perspective, having previously noticed the interesting differences between myself and my friends. they're really lovely people! really nice and kind and loving folks. but they have a selfish/fear-based-protectionist side to them, like all humans do.
that last bit is the important bit for me. fear leads selfish behaviour. people are worried, the "system" is unstable and constantly under strain. and that makes them act in their own selfish interests because they're having to jostle for position within the "system" :shrug:
> Politicians simply bend in order not to upset any of the key voting blocs. But you understand that's a selection bias: you wouldn't exist as a successful politician if you didn't do this. All those who go another path are doomed to obscurity.
this has always been the critical problem from where i sit. like, we're forced to vote for people who, ultimately, may only be in the job for a maximum of 5 years total. we don't get to vote on the next 30 years cos the next lot could just undo it all. just look at upcoming negotiations with the EU apparently might involve us moving back towards the single market again, which was the whole "once in a generation" brexit vote thing. turns out it's not quite so "once in a generation" [2]
the trouble for me is that the commonly implemented "long term" model for governance tends to be stuff like authoritarianism, dictatorship etc. ... so...
--
i wrote way more for this than i thought i would lol
[0]: yeah! let's properly hold them to account! i can finally use my autistic powers of calling bullshit for the benefit of all! instead of getting into trouble with my boss at work. again. o_o
[1]: the non-academic parts were really damaging though. expensive doesn't always mean good. highly rated academically doesn't always mean good.
As a side note if you did just get fat and smoke you wouldn't be a drain on the NHS because being fat and smoking disqualifies you from many procedures and you are likely to die right around retirement age, after you paid most of your lifetime taxes but before you start consuming the very expensive age-related healthcare.
Ironically it is the unhealthy that are overpaying and the very healthy who are underpaying because age related care is such a huge proportion of lifetime medical costs, and that is still before adding in potential sin taxes paid.
The alternative is everything falling apart at home and our manufacturing industries declining dramatically. Maybe the "unpopular economic policy" wasn't such a bad idea after all.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
The issue is that the stupider the politician, the more likely they are unable to understand why their clear, simple answer to the ills of the world is also wrong.
Brexit, whatever is happening in the US, is caused by narcissism (a common trait among politicians) paired with a great deal of stupidity and ineptitude, not only among politicians, but among the populace as well.
The fact that he has done countless things that are harmful to the US and not a single thing that is in the country's best interests tells me all I need to know. Either he's aligned with an enemy or he just hates the country and wants to destroy it.
Yeah I think the most obvious explanation is looting and ego (to explain the ballroom and putting his name everywhere). I also think there's an awful lot of foreign influence around him and his family and friends before and during his term(s). I mean if I'm a foreign actor seeing your leader's keen interest in looting, I'll probably make him an offer or two...
That money is held in a US treasury account. In February the estimated price from the first 50 M barrels was $2.8bn... with the USA+Israel bombing of Iran, the price of course would have increased since.
> It is not clear what portion of the revenues from the sale - which analysts expect to raise about $2.8bn (£2.1bn) - would be shared with Venezuela.
But let's assume that the USA is going to retain "only" 5% of it: that's still 140 million $ of money flowing in, in perpetuity.
Not to mention that having control of the whole 2.8 billion $ also buys further room for loan and deals made on the USA's preferred currency and preferred terms... Or the expropriation of CITGO.
Of course, that money flowing in will be mostly in the pocket of Trump itself, of the billionaires surrounding him, of the military industrial complex (you have to replenish the weapons stockpiles, after all) and all of the federal contractors (that includes most of the FAANG!)... Lots of people in the USA "labor aristocracy" are going to see material benefit from it.
Ultimately, there's still going to be lots of poor people in the USA who won't be able to afford insulin, and there's going to be lots of resentment abroad (not only in Venezuela)... And one could split hair that Maduro's kidnapping is in the USA's interest, but not in its "best interest" (or similarly trying to argue a no-true-scotman for the definition of "USA's interest")
Not to mention, but it's not only Trump's: it's everyone who he surrounds himself with: JD Vance, Pam Bondi (until a few days ago?), Pete Hegseth, the military generals that didn't get kicked out by Hegseth, etc.
They're all complicit, and they're all going along with him.
And of course, if the Democrats will return to power in the next few elections, I don't expect them to relinquish the leverage and resources that Trump got them, just like Obama and Biden didn't pull out of Afghanistan for several years.
Of course, we saw with AIPAC and JStreet that US lobbying is seeing tons of money from abroad: but those are two different faces of the same medal: the oligarchs and the bourgeoisie have common interests across different countries, and the USA is definitely influencing politicians abroad as much, if not more, than moneyed interests abroad are influencing politicians in the USA.
> That money is held in a US treasury account. In February the estimated price from the first 50 M barrels was $2.8bn... with the USA+Israel bombing of Iran, the price of course would have increased since.
That’s chicken feed compared to the amounts that have been wiped off the stock markets.
I mean on their own those are nice numbers, but you also have to add in the extra military costs of blowing crap up and it starts to seem like chump change to me. We just had a 1.5 trillion defense spending proposal.
Trump, if the US makes it through this administration, might be a boon longterm if it wakes up the populace. The blatantly obvious corruption and grift might just do the trick. Those are some pretty big ifs though.
I disagree with probably the majority of Trump's main policy ideas, but I think a strong case can be made that his immigration policies are in the country's best interests. Not all of them, but as a whole.
Illegal immigration brings masses of people from more corrupt, disordered, and perhaps lower average intelligence societies into the US in conditions that make it hard for even the ones who are capable of assimilation to assimilate. It also constitutes a massive flouting of the law for the benefit of business, which sets a bad precedent and lowers public trust in institutions. It also contributes to rising racial tensions that encourage the growth of ethnic tribalism and weaken trust in liberalism.
If you really want to get rid of illegal immigrants, you don't need ICE doing sweeps.
Just make them unemployable. Setup an effective employment eligibility system, and require that employers verify the workers in the system before any payment over $100. Collect biometrics from workers and verify against IRS records. Employers that flout this get fines of 10x wages paid, up to N% of revenue, and maybe jailtime for owners and managers that knowingly violate.
What we have in the U.S. is a bunch of people and politicians loudly decrying illegal immigration and illegal employment, but enjoying the fruits of that illegal employment while paying a fraction of what legal workers would have to be paid.
There's huge appetite for a police state against the little guy, and no appetite for that same police state against business owners and managers.
There's a better way than that. The way the US tax system actually works is incredibly misleading:
1) We pretend to have an income tax but then make it work like a consumption tax in practice. Ordinary people put earnings in excess of spending in a 401k and defer the tax until they want to spend the money. Rich people defer capital gains indefinitely until they want to spend the money. It's an income tax on paper but a consumption tax in practice, and doing it that way is much more complicated than just using a consumption tax.
2) We pretend to have a progressive income tax, but then impose benefits phase outs that fully cancel out the difference in marginal rates between the poor and the rich. Convert the benefits to cash and eliminate the phase outs and you get something which is equally if not more progressive, significantly more efficient and dramatically less complicated.
So, you can throw all of that out and replace it with a flat rate consumption tax and a UBI and it would be as close to a Pareto optimal improvement as anything in politics ever is.
Which also makes a huge amount of headway against the illegal immigration problem, because another disadvantage of pretending to have an income tax is that it effectively subsidizes anyone paying people under the table since then they're not paying the tax. Whereas if people working under the table still have to pay the consumption tax on everything they buy, and they also don't receive the UBI because they're not lawful residents, they'd be at a disadvantage relative to ordinary citizens, instead of the existing system where breaking the rules makes you better off.
The tax code is inefficient on purpose. A simple uniform system is politically infeasible, due to the fact our political system relies on pretending to give special favors to every tailored interest group individually (making the tax code even bigger every time).
We arent at a loss of what to change to make it simpler/optimal. We're at a loss at how to make anyone proposing that not lose the election when everyone else is telling each group they'll lose their special carveous and how about I sweeten the deal some more.
That part of it doesn't seem like the problem. If you want to make a carve out for some group and you're using a consumption tax then you just don't tax that thing or lower the rate (with the cost of having to increase the general rate on everything else). This is occasionally even a good thing, e.g. have a higher tax rate on petroleum than other things to price the externality, or a lower rate on groceries because they're a necessity.
And many of the carve outs are stupid and we shouldn't do them, but that's a separate layer of complexity/inefficiency on top of the mess we get from trying to pretend that "progressive marginal rate structure" and "means testing government benefits" are useful things to have at the same time when they're the mathematical inverse of one another, or that we want an "income tax" even though we don't want the major disincentive for anyone to have savings or make productive investments rather than immediately spending all income on hedonistic consumption.
I agree that your idea would be better. That said, it is still quite possible that even Trump's immigration approach is overall more good than bad for the country.
It's really not. They're deporting less people than Biden did during the same time[1]. They're spending record amounts of money per person deported as well.
I don't disagree that we should be deporting people faster, but this is not the way to accomplish that goal at all. Nor should we be building huge detention facilities. We should be making the process go smoother and faster, not holding people.
Even if Trump's approach is worse than Biden's, which I'm not sure of, that still does not mean it is bad for the country.
Counting deportations alone does not count people who decide not to come at all.
Also, note that I did not say that we should necessarily be deporting more people. I am actually pretty neutral on illegal immigration. But I am trying to address the question of what is good for the country, which is a different thing from what my personal preferences are.
> Even if Trump's approach is worse than Biden's, which I'm not sure of, that still does not mean it is bad for the country.
But the discussion isn't about whether it's bad, but whether it's in the countries best interest. If you switch to a less effective & more damaging policy compared to your predecessor, it's not in the countries best interest, even if it's (supposedly) better than nothing.
Trump's immigration approach is not an approach - it's just an excuse for him to create his own Gestapo.
What was the point of sending ICE, a "domestic" agency, to the Winter Olympics, or letting them take over duties from the TSA? What does an "Immigration and Customs Enforcement" agency have anything to do at a foreign country? What's the point of the Secret Service then?
Intelligence at least as measured by IQ tests is not distributed evenly across humanity. Intelligence as measured by scientific achievements is also not distributed evenly across humanity. Now, this does not mean that intelligence is necessarily not distributed evenly across humanity. For example, I imagine that Germans in 1 AD probably had about the same innate biological intelligence level as Germans in 1800. Yet Germans in 1 AD had few intellectual achievements, whereas in 1800 were some of the most intellectually achieving people in the world. So clearly there is more going on than just biologically innate intelligence. Yet certainly there is some good reason to believe that some human groups have more innate biological intelligence potential than others. I don't think it's racism to claim this. It would be racism to advocate, for example, for treating a high-performing person like a low-performing person because he comes from a low-performing ethnic group. Which I'm not. Like I said in another comment, my attitude to illegal immigration is neutral. But from the point of view of what is best for the United States as a country, which is different from what I personally want, I think it's probably best to encourage immigration of average-high-intelligence groups rather than average-low-intelligence ones.
> Illegal immigration brings masses of people from more corrupt, disordered […]
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." — Donald Trump, June 16, 2015
What blows my mind is how liberals and progressives (of which I count myself a member) don't see to care that this is the policy that pushed Trump into office. Without it he would have flopped with just his MAGA core.
All you need to do to fix illegal immigration is to go after the employers. You know, actually enforce the laws. Streamline it. Declare it a national emergency and put more onerous requirements on businesses to verify legal status. Send ICE to businesses to investigate them instead of kidnapping people.
You'll probably find out pretty quickly that agriculture is extremely dependent on illegal labour, but so be it. Bring it into the light and have an actual debate. The current approach is all for show, or at worst, intimidation.
Currently, probably yes. If American immigration policy was reshaped to favor immigration of people from high-performing societies, then it would be the opposite.
What color are the people in these 'high performing societies'? I think I have a guess.
Did 'high performing societies' build the railroads? Mine the steel? Forge it? Did 'high performing societies' build the culture we enjoy today?
Here's a secret that you should know but evidently life has never taught you: people who have to struggle to survive are generally smarter, more vigorous, more honorable people. They understand the toll in sweat and blood that the wrong decision takes. They are exactly who we need.
We don't need a nation of pampered trust fund man-children, turning up their delicate noses at everyone not a member of a 'high performing society'.
Being a reserve currency puts a gun to your economy's head. It creates an asymmetry where domestic production of material goods has to jump a gap created by favorable exchange rates in PPP terms. Its great for the day to day life style of your citizens, as other economy's do indeed pay tribute, in a sense, to their consumption of goods produced overseas. However, being paid to do nothing becomes a real problem when the checks stop coming. We're basically the national equivalent of a middle manager who's forgotten all the skills that got him there, and we can voluntarily move back down and start to work in earnest again, or wait to get laid off with no severance.
It's as much a gun to adversaries' heads if they hold lots of your bonds (China used to hold over $1T in USTs) so they would have an interest in not having that blow up by not annoying the US so much they refuse to pay foreign bonds.
It's also kind of neat as a financial MAD instrument, because China obviously can't just get everyone to go into their brokerage and market sell a trillion in USTs so they get a lever to pressure the US with but they can't go nuclear without also vaporising their own value. So it works as a melting ice block on which diplomacy is forced on both sides.
The death of the UST as a reserve instrument would be a catastrophically bad loss, the only silver lining is that the melting ice block might still be enough by the end of this admin that the new admin might have enough to stand on to rebuild it should they realise the value of it.
Luke's key point lands at about 1:08:27–1:08:33, where he says that instead of selling treasuries outright (which would draw attention from the American embassy), China can use them as collateral — and the American banks are happy to take it. He then lists what China gets in return: "I'll take Pereus. I'll take that oil field. I'll take that copper mine. I'll take all that gold."
He then adds that this works because the incentives align on both sides — the Chinese want to understate their strength, the Americans want to overstate theirs, and the American banks are happy to accept dollar collateral without asking too many questions.
> It's as much a gun to adversaries' heads if they hold lots of your bonds (China used to hold over $1T in USTs)
There is a complicated dynamic at play to consider there. Treasuries and the strength of the dollar only matter to wrt international trade, for both China and the US. You have to ask yourself if the value of the dollar went to 0 for that use case, who would be in a worse position, the one that sells dollars to support consumption, or the one that buys them as a tool for trade with 3rd parties?
> by not annoying the US so much they refuse to pay foreign bonds.
The problem with this is that a country can only refuse to pay their foreign bonds once. But the buyer can always dump them and scoop them up later for cheap when shit hits the fan.
If you just don't run a mega defict every year you can afford to use the interest other countries would have to pay you to borrow dollars to subsidize your own economy.
"the interest other countries would have to pay you..."
That's the problem, they don't have to, and they can choose not to.
The fiscal deficit is a whole separate matter, but I think it is a downstream effect of the kind of policies and economy that develop when you run a huge trade deficit selling your currency for goods and services.
As someone who lives a day to day life, I’m pretty happy for things that are good for my day to day life. Some abstract quasi moralistic reason that things should be tougher so we compete harder feels a little out of touch. I’d note that it’s not the case the US produces nothing, or that it’s lost its capacity to innovate. Effectively most technology, especially software, but hardware as well, is concentrated in the US. Some aspects of the heavy manufacturing and assembly line happens elsewhere but I’d level the middle manager more at the EU.
No, we are taking our advantages and lighting them on fire for no obvious reason. Backing into a rationale doesn’t make it rational. Its Christian nationalism fueling raging narcissism made malignant due to senility. Theres no experts, no adults, no experienced people - they’ve all be fired and replaced with sycophantic photogenic personalities. This is not good, there is no upside, it’s Nero hosting UFC while the empire burns.
The only out I see is nature helping end this or a total seismic change in Congress and removal from office. Then rebuilding can start and maybe there’s something to salvage. But I doubt it, and I expect the next generations will exist in the rubble of the colosseum.
I'm not going to take a side in the broader discussion here, however your response fails to engage with what was previously written.
> Some abstract quasi moralistic reason
What was presented was neither abstract nor moralistic. The argument was one of driving towards a cliff and taking preemptive action before reaching it.
No, it was driving towards a cliff and deciding to jump out of the car instead of pressing the breaks. If you're costing at work, worried about being laid off some day, the last thing you do is just quit; you job hunt and try to change habits. Pretending like we have to feel immense pain to strengthen the economy is the quasi moralistic reasoning of a moron
> Some abstract quasi moralistic reason that things should be tougher so we compete harder feels a little out of touch.
I don't see how any of those descriptions fit what I've said. Also, note, things should indeed not be tougher. A consequence of our economy being so focused on financialization of overseas productivity is that the wealth created from that activity tends to be much more concentrated than that produced from manufacturing, at least historically. Though, who knows if that would hold if onshoring took off in earnest.
> I’d note that it’s not the case the US produces nothing, or that it’s lost its capacity to innovate
Never said either of those things. I only stated that it makes domestic production harder/less profitable. Though, I'd also like to point out that that the largest companies in our economy are wholly dependent on the output of an island with grave geopolitical risks hanging over its head. China could collapse our economy overnight due to unchecked offshoring. That's not quasi, abstract, or moralistic, just a state we've created.
> No, we are taking our advantages and lighting them on fire for no obvious reason. Backing into a rationale doesn’t make it rational. Its Christian nationalism fueling raging narcissism made malignant due to senility.
I mean, I have named several, and all of which were put forth prior to Trump's term starting. I'm not a fan of Trump, but it would seem to me you are creating a narrative for yourself that doesn't fit history.
> Theres no experts, no adults, no experienced people - they’ve all be fired and replaced with sycophantic photogenic personalities.
I think Bessent is pretty good.
> This is not good, there is no upside, it’s Nero hosting UFC while the empire burns. The only out I see is nature helping end this or a total seismic change in Congress and removal from office. Then rebuilding can start and maybe there’s something to salvage. But I doubt it, and I expect the next generations will exist in the rubble of the colosseum.
Idk about rubble, but corruption does need to be curbed IMO. The current administration has not been good for the rule of law, in spirit. I do think some level of that is unavoidable however, as the judicial branch and executive branches have been sucking power from the legislature for going on 50 years, which also needs correcting.
I think the way you phrased your point was quasi moralistic - perhaps not intentionally.
However I’d note that the economic theory of comparative advantage says the rational move is countries and states and cities specialize in what they have a comparative advantage in and by doing so the entire system becomes optimal. Everyone trying to be self sufficient within themselves, and the absurdity of the trade imbalance as a measure, is grossly inefficient for everyone and pulls the entire planet down. Obviously this doesn’t account for instability, but it does explain why our economy has focused in areas we have a comparative advantage while depending on other economies for theirs. This is a feature of modern economic theory, but perhaps has flaws in practical political senses.
Bessent is a complete idiot who equates having money with intellectual supremacy. He’s a sociopath in real life, a sycophant in political life, and a moron who does well following orders of someone smarter than him. He was successful at other people’s funds but when he started his own he totally flopped. He has a gentleman’s degree is political science from Yale, and his uncle was convicted of corruption and spent time in prison while in the US House of Representatives- demonstrating the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. See his corruption regarding mortgages and investment properties for proof.
I do agree we had been dismantling our advantages for a while, but what I said was Trump lit them on fire. In a little over a year every structural advantage the US has enjoyed post WWII is gone and we are hated by allies and enemies alike. We have no leverage with anyone on anything, everyone who might have let us have advantage is seeking a backstop away from us, and any sense we had engendered as a place for people to come to pursue opportunity is gone. We’ve dismantled institutions that took generations to build in months, and eliminated all good will across the planet with literally every human being that uses fossil fuels in any way. This is the most breathtakingly destructive frittering away of advantage for zero gains I could imagine short of simply declaring nuclear war on ourselves.
> However I’d note that the economic theory of comparative advantage says the rational move is countries and states and cities specialize in what they have a comparative advantage in and by doing so the entire system becomes optimal.
The basis of trade barriers of any kind is necessarily against an optimal global economy. I get that. Its the default free trade argument. It's a bit of a spherical-cow argument however, as the moment a country implements any kind of market regulation, free trade becomes arbitration around those regulations. So, unless the entire world becomes libertarian, that argument doesn't hold water.
I'd focus less on the U30 part, and more on the 30U, if that makes sense — the problem is with people who seek that sort of attention (and that 79 year old certainly qualifies as wanting that sort of attention). For those people, their businesses are a means to an end in the most cynical way possible.
Speak for yourself. I'm O18 and I don't want him in there like you claim to. Most of his base claimed to be anti-pedo until they saw the evidence in the unredacted subset of the Epstein files that Congress legally forced him to release, and now suddenly they're pro-pedo (and pro-war and pro-bombing-schoolchildren). But you be you, and make baseless evidence-free false equivalence accusations against other people to justify the rapes and legally adjudicated sexual assault and pussy grabbing by the guy you as an "O18" claim you want in there.
This is shouting at the clouds I'm afraid (I don't mean this in a dismissive way). I understand the reasoning, but it's frankly none of your business how I write my code or my commits, unless I choose to share that with you. You also have a right to deny my PRs in your own project of course, and you don't even have to tell me why! I think on github at least you can even ban me from submitting PRs.
While I agree that it would be nice to filter out low effort PRs, I just don't see how you could possibly police it without infringing on freedoms. If you made it mandatory for frontier models, people would find a way around it, or simply write commits themselves, or use open weight models from China, etc.
Very cool. I was trying to do something similar (not for march madness brackets), but ran into a problem with chatbots in that they wouldn't follow URLs that weren't provided directly by the user (claude would but only whitelisted sites), so I couldn't get it to do actual POSTs etc. for authentication. Claude.ai would instead create react app (fragments). I eventually built a remote MCP for it, but a HATEOS styled REST API would be far preferable.
No - I think we are months (weeks/Days?) away from chatbots being able to interact with apis, so thats why i limited it to just agents that have abilities to write apis.
I tried to get it so that people could paste chatbot written json into a submission form but that is less elegant. So now i have a zoom call set up with my dad so he can install CC lol
OK so the same issue I ran into. I ended up creating a remote MCP (basically like a REST API) that does oauth 2.1. If interested you can check it out here: https://github.com/pairshaped/gleam-mcp-todo
There is a valid both sides argument to a lot of these issues IMO, but where the discussion ought to be is at how extreme “one” side has taken it.
Whether it’s executive orders, corruption, pardons, appointments, obstruction, gerrymandering. pedophilia, lying, etc. I don’t think there’s a valid defence of just how far one particular side has gone (and proactively I might add).
The other day an ICE lawyer told our state's court that when a bunch of ICE agents rolled up to a private citizen's house and harassed and threatened them, they "were not acting according to policy"
So, yeah.
But none of that stops Meta wanting to help Trump be more efficient at harassing discontent.
> The developer is the bottleneck. We're slow compared to computers. A language where the compiler has already verified structural correctness before the diff reaches your screen means the reviewer can focus on logic and intent instead of chasing down missing nil checks.
For me this is Gleam. Fairly small lang, type safe, compiled, NO NULLS (very important IMO), good FFI, code is readable, and... you get the BEAM!
Agents can pretty much iterate on their own.
The most important thing for me, at least for now (and IMO the foreseeable future) is being able to review and read the output code clearly. I am the bottleneck in the agent -> human loop, so optimizing for that by producing clear and readable code is a massive priority. Gleam eliminates a ton of errors automatically so my reviews are focused on mostly business logic (also need to explicitly call out redundant code often enough).
I could see an argument for full on Erlang too, but I like the static typing.
Under the hood you're still calling into BEAM/OTP but most operations are covered in gleam, at least I've very rarely needed to FFI into Erlang (couple times to extend what a library provides with a custom edge case).
gleam/io, mist, gleam/otp, sqlight, gleam_pgo, etc.
There are definitely some caveats / tradeoffs with SQLite, but I can't think of any that are specifically related to many to many relationships. Which features did you find missing? Lateral joins maybe?
I only remember from my last Django project, that I started out thinking: "OK, I will do things properly, no many-to-many relationships..." then at some point saw the need for them, or manually creating the intermediate relation and at that point using the Django way was what I was supposed to do. But then I got errors for some things I wanted about not being supported by SQLite.
The project is here: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/web-app-vocabulary-tra... But I left it unfinished and a quick grep does not yield comments or something that explains why at some place I do something to circumvent the SQLite problems. I remember though, that I basically swore to myself, that I would not ever use SQLite in production with Django ORM. And if I am not using it in production, then testing also better should not be using it, because one should test with the same RDBMS as runs in production, or risk unexpected issues suddenly only happening in production. So SQLite is out for anything serious in Django projects for me.
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