> The Trump administration’s popularity is already below 50% Just under 50% of the population voted for President Trump, so it's a given that "already" the popularity is below 50%.
USA 2024 population was ~340.1 million (census estimate). 156,302,318 voted (~63.9% of ~244 million eligible voters, extrapolated) 77.3 million voted for Trump (~49.8% of voters). So that's ~31.6% of eligible voters or ~22.7% of the US population.
Welp, maybe those eligible voters who didn't vote will remember next time that not voting is the same as voting for the winner.
The is exactly a move the people in power in those troubled countries will use to maintain control over government. It used to be that the US government had pride in its own professionalism. The US is now acting like the countries it loves to destabilize.
Well, Russia is destabilizing the US and winning which is why I think we're acting like that. And it seems all of our military and counterintelligence capabilities can't stop it. Too much offense, not enough defense, it seems.
To say that Russia is destabilising the US basically takes the agency of the US out of the equation. Makes the US (the so-called greatest country in the world, so-called leaders of the free world) unaccountable for its own actions.
The US is destabilising itself with the help of Russia.
The US military might be battle-hardened and ready for war, but the US public is not. The public is soft and fragile and totally unready for the sacrifices and losses that come from a serious war where we're not an overwhelming force against a tiny Middle Eastern country. The public will not work together collectively to get through a war. We're not going to put up with rationing programs, collecting scrap metal, Vic…
We acted quickly post-9/11, buying duct tape and trash bags and taking off our belts at the airport. You may be surprised how the public can be united against a human enemy. The success of the Right during COVID was turning the outrage away from the invisible virus and onto the humans forcing them to wear a mask.
I'll believe it when I see it, hopefuly we never have to. 9/11 was almost 25 years ago--an entire generation. A lot has changed since then. Today, the public is softer, fatter, less healthy, less sane, lonelier, more individualistic and isolated from each other, more addicted to drugs, more addicted to phones, chronically online, narcissistic, and self-obsessed than they were in 2001. And when it comes to playing well with other people they are less tolerant, angrier, more belligerent, less capable of cooperating, defiant against even minor sacrifices that might help others... We have this "in it for ourselves" religion that wasn't as strong in 2001. I don't think even a land invasion by a foreign aggressor could unify us anymore.
> he already passed tax cuts, but only for the wealthy Well, they’re about to expire and their extension hasn’t been passed yet. But yes. I’m getting a tax cut while the farmers who voted for him get tariffed out of their export markets. Sort of wild.
The next tax cuts are why they're going ham tryign to find things to cut because it's going to blow an enormous whole in the deficit.
Well technically the existing tax cuts already did blow a whole in the budget; its keeping them that's at play here. Its one of the reasons Trump was popular amongst his base - he cut taxes but didn't cut spending, so many people got a tax boost without any austerity. People can hand wave the spending as spurious Democrat led initiatives because there's no real discussion amongst the base about how to actually cover the tax losses.
The actual choices are one of: cut medicaid, cut medicare, cut military, cut social security, raise taxes. Tariffs would technically work to if they result in higher prices, but then they seem equivalent to raising taxes (very generally) so not sure if its worth breaking out.
"Stopping" can mean many things. Reaching the altitude of space is much, much, easier than reaching orbital velocity. This meant that during the Global War on Terror, people had legitimate questions about if Al Qaida could damage the ISS. The answer then was "no", but amateurs reached the Kármán line in 2004, students in 2019, and the current altitude record holder is 143 km. I suspect that it is well within the capa…
Destroy a Starship on the pad? Possible. Destroy a Starship during ascent? That's much harder. There are two problems: You have to have enough greater acceleration that you can catch it, and you have to have good enough targeting (and maneuverability) to actually hit it. Those are highly non-trivial problems.
You don't have to catch it from behind, just put yourself in it's path and let Starship's own kinetic energy cause the damage with your own velocity being nearly stationary vs the ground at the time.
Aiming is one of the easier things: huge target, multi-gigwatt heat signiature.
It still works last time I checked – with fraction of headcount and with people working from the office. Twitter had few months runway until it'd run out of money and go bankrupt. Bloomberg analysis says (despite advertisers and communities leave etc) platform earnings seem to be staying at $1.2 billion a year. Reports from Feb 2025 say that X doubled its adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation…
Your argument seems to be entirely financial rather than what twitter _does_. My understanding is their MAUs and DAUs have fallen. Fewer people are looking at it or posting on it, less often. https://soax.com/research/twitter-active-users https://mashable.com/article/twitter-x-daily-active-users-dr... I think it's interesting that you mention bloomberg as saying that things are going ok. My recent read was that they…
My argument is around cutting workforce and requirement to be present in the office in context of efficency in general. Sentiment of people predicting total failure back then feels like flashback now.
The checks and balances part no longer exists, so definitely feels like it’s over.
> checks and balances part no longer exists It honestly hasn't existed for decades.
Sure it has but only when a Democrat is in office. Look at all the things that Biden/Obama were prevented from doing by the legislative and judicial branches.
You assume that continuous combat deployments automatically translate to full-scale war readiness, but there's a big difference between counterinsurgency operations and peer-to-peer warfare. The US military has been engaged in conflicts for decades, but most of them involved fighting non-state actors or weaker conventional forces, not a high-intensity war against an advanced military.
Advanced is doing some heavy lifting. The US military is far a cut above everything else, in terms of tactical readiness, sheer firepower and especially effective size. We outspend any other nation - China included of which we spend an estimated 2.5 times more than - and we have been in that lead position for decades, not just years. While yes, US forces haven’t squared off against conventional militaries of any note…
>China being a nuclear power means it would be unlikely to escalate past a certain point if anyone is acting rationally.
Well, Russia is a nuclear power, and not everyone is acting rationally. Russia got part of it's own territory occupied now, and some important oil and gas facilities are literally being bombed, not talking about regular cities and homes.
Russian nuclear doctrine is: Russia could launch nuclear weapons in response to an attack on its territory by a non-nuclear-armed state.
Their warheads are still at bay, why is that? I don't believe they will ever fly, because no-one is stupid enough to make the first move, and the war can go on neglecting them.
The disruption is (part of) the point. Degrading the ability of government employees to do their jobs leads to greater inefficiency and more failure, which can then be pointed at to validate assertions that government isn't efficient and produces bad outcomes.
It's also intended to frustrate people so that they are encouraged to quit.