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More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts

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301–310 of 336 posts

Re: More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts

#301
post #9

Insider trading as a service. No one is going to take the US seriously for the next 50 years.

In most areas (drug enforcement, basic education, healthcare, gun culture...) nobody should have been taking the US seriously maybe since Reagan. Finance, science and war were the only areas you could count on the US but now they went full Roman on the rest of the world not even that anymore. War is the only thing that's left I think.

With missteps and imperial arrogance in Iran and Ukraine, perhaps the world might not be counting on the US as much militarily either?

"An army marches on its stomach"... If things at most soldiers homes aren't as good as they could easily be (financial prospects, opportunities..), maybe they don't have the same drive to fight with the same vision and discipline as they used to? I hope they will employ good vision and discipline.

Science is gradually getting gutted too...

Re: More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts

#302
post #47

Curious: are there any republicans left on HN? I have no concept of how you can defend this

im not american. i'm not even from a western country. but as a bystand observer, it's a bit late to start a conversation with republicans on social media. after cancelling them for years. you reap what you saw. you never cared about understanding their point of view and now that conversation can never be had again

Re: More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read Marx, he predicted so many things that would happen during the late stage capitalism phase.

And yet he gave us nothing in terms of what alternative economic would look like apart from a "a free association of workers" or something. Turns out it's a hard problem.

From my read of the Manifesto… while I may not have been impressed by the writing, that is from my perspective over 150 years later.

We got a lot of the things Marx was calling for. Of the 10 point plan near the end of section 2, we got:

- "2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax." today's rates look "heavy" by the standards of the 1848, even if we've also seen it decline somewhat from the peak.

- "3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance." not fully of course, but inheritance tax is absolutely a thing in a way it wasn't in 1848, and was one of the contributors to the decline of country estates in the UK.

- "5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.", again, clearly not as described, but the central banks do now direct how much credit costs for all the other banks, and financial regulation has changed hugely since then (even if some of this has also been falling away as quickly as the rich think they can get away with it).

- "6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State." has been on-and-off in the intervening time depending on where and which technology: the Royal Mail/USPS; I'm not quite old enough to remember the end of British Telecoms' monopoly on UK phones. For transport, likewise, depends on the specifics, does the British Highways Agency or American Federal Highway Administration count? Motor vehicles (let alone aircraft) came quite some time after the Manifesto was written, the tech of that era was shipping and canals, railways existed but the big boom hadn't happened yet. British Rail was a nationalised thing when I was young. Deutsche Bahn is still state-owned, but on the other hand British busses are private and I don't know how to think correctly about how British bus routes are run/bid for/regulated.

- "7. …; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan." (trimmed a bit I'm not sure about), Superfund site cleanup?

- "9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; …" (trimmed the absolutely-not part), this seems correct, given how industrialised farming is?

- "10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c." - done so hard we don't even want to trade with places that don't do it

Remember, the form of capitalism that Marx et al were fighting against was laissez-faire, which basically died with the Great Depression. It's not the form of mixed economics we have today which we still call "capitalism".

Re: More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eras like this one can be what kills an empire/great power. Is there actually any good analogue for this era that caused a previous empire or great power to collapse?

I think the whole “empire collapsing” is a bit of a dramatized phrasing, though historians can correct me. I think it’s much more death by a thousand cuts, and the UK is a great analogue in that regard. Look at Brexit, for example. Or Black Wednesday, from which the US’s esteemed Treasury Secretary profited handsomely. The UK’s decline has taken centuries, though, and there are many events that one can point to. I th…

> The UK’s decline has taken centuries, though, and there are many events that one can point to. I think I agree with the grandparent’s comment about grandparents, about the arrogance of how things will continue to be a certain way.

I don't think that's accurate. I'd put the peak of the British Empire at just before WW1 and the obvious end of it somewhere between independence for India, Wind of Change, and Suez.

You could point to errors made before then, and IMO the Potato Famine was so egregious it was probably a contributing factor to the invention of literal Communism, but I'd say the actual collapse began with the Pyrrhic victory of WW1.

Re: More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts

#305

Capitalism implodes on itself, just as predicted..

So you erode democracy, and now blame capitalism?

Hi, Europe chiming in here. We still have proper democracies combined with capitalism, and life is great here.

But hey, if you don't like capitalism, go to some country where they don't have it, like North Korea or Cuba.

Re: More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts

#306
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most areas (drug enforcement, basic education, healthcare, gun culture...) nobody should have been taking the US seriously maybe since Reagan. Finance, science and war were the only areas you could count on the US but now they went full Roman on the rest of the world not even that anymore. War is the only thing that's left I think.

The US also arguably lost the Iran war. So far it can't claim any minor fraction of a victory, at least; seems to be the general consensus. I like to read Bret Devereaux (from the frequently HN posted https://acoup.blog/ ) takes on this in his Bluesky ( https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social )

Id say there was not a single chance "to win" from the beginning on? (whatever "winning" in a war may mean)

Re: More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts

#307
post #9

Insider trading as a service. No one is going to take the US seriously for the next 50 years.

And the big issue is that everyone jumps on it (professionals and amateurs alike) because of FOMO; the past 15, 20 years have been wild in that regard, with loads of things soaring in value going from Apple, to Tesla, via Bitcoin and pokemon cards / "the everything bubble" to now anything involving AI. And people want to catch the boat this time. It's one reason why NFTs took off as hard as they did (before collapsing).

And it becomes self-reinforcing, with people simping (to use that word again) for whichever thing they've invested in. I have serious doubts people actually believe in $product, but they believe other people will at the very least invest in it. And they all believe the masses are stupider (and have more money to invest) than they do.

Finally, it's the wild west. Regulation and consequences have failed, because the people enriching themselves are running the show now. At least in the US, but thanks to open financial ties, they can get money from more regulated countries as well.

Re: More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts

#308
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decline of the Roman Empire, depending on how you define it, played out over centuries, if not a millennium. It is such a bad analogy for the kind of within-our-lifetimes collapse that is being speculated about here that it undermines the original concern. The decline of Germany as the leading scientific powerhouse in the first half if the 20th century would be a better case study imho.

It is highly unlikely that the US is going to collapse any time in our lifetimes. Or even those of our children. Also, let's not forget that the Trump admin is a problem of 2.5 years at most. Trump has greatly stressed the safeguards in our system, but I don't think that he has broken them. That is actually an optimistic instead of a pessimistic signal -- an anti-statesman even in the highest office couldn't meaningf…

> Also, let's not forget that the Trump admin is a problem of 2.5 years at most.

If he invades Greenland, the US not only loses all NATO allies, but may be at actual war (rather than merely trade war) with them; the Asian allies are also getting worried because of how he's interacting with China. This administration is also somehow managing to piss off Israel despite having gone into a war as a co-belligerent with them against Iran, also pissing off all the other American allies in the middle east, and the Iran conflict is currently making people question the benefit of even having the US as an ally in the first place because the US can't keep them safe from Iranian counterstrikes, but even more broadly the US don't seem to be able to keep Iran from charging tolls on Hormuz so everyone else with a similarly strategic strait may be wondering if they can do the same.

The administration also has problems with re-emergence of diseases due to a combination of cutting funding and chaos (e.g. while screwworm may have come back anyway, the government response was suboptimal), and in some cases actively promoting disinformation (e.g. vaccinations). It takes a lot more work to eradicate some disease than to keep it away.

And this is without any of the current, justifiable, concerns that Trump may use ICE or similar to interfere with even this year's elections, let alone the end of his term.

Trump may not kill the US outright in just this term, the ships of state are slow to turn let alone sink, but he may do a Great Leap Forward.

Re: More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts

#309
post #178
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decline of the Roman Empire, depending on how you define it, played out over centuries, if not a millennium. It is such a bad analogy for the kind of within-our-lifetimes collapse that is being speculated about here that it undermines the original concern. The decline of Germany as the leading scientific powerhouse in the first half if the 20th century would be a better case study imho.

> The decline of Germany as the leading scientific powerhouse in the first half if the 20th century Go on? WW1 and its consequences?

WW2 and it's consequences will be a big part of this.

Consider the Oppenheimer movie. The majority of physicists depicted there are people who left Europe around that time.

It's this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210165

Re: More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm really uninformed but classic liberal and libertarian are polar opposites. Republican policy is insanely archaic and constrains human freedoms much more that Democrats, so I'm struggling to see how a libertarian could support the guys putting militarized unaccountable secret police into our cities to terrorize and kill Americans. They're also much more into thought crimes than Dems, so I'm really wondering…

Classic liberals and libertarians both favor individual freedom and limited government, but libertarians generally take the limited government bit a little further. Militarized police is definitely one of the areas I disagree with Republicans on, along with abortion restrictions. As for thought crimes, it's a toss up IMO, but I view Democrats as more likely to try to legislate against them. I'd like federal governmen…

It seems like you learn about politics through propaganda. When I hear "classic liberal", I think of the philosophical origin of liberalism: Locke and Hobbes. Libertarian contains the same root word, but is not similar to liberal other than that.

If you pursue freedom, and individual liberty and are a US citizen, there's no way to consider GOP policy as providing more freedom or liberty. The only 2 areas I can think of where they even claim to be for freedom is: guns and freedom for corporations.

Then there's literally everything else: being a woman, not straight, not white, not Christian, an income tax payer, a property owner near an unregulated corporate entity, a person who likes sane people to have access to semiautomatic long guns, a person who enjoys drugs, a person who wants to buy or sell sex, ... etc

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