Sean 3

@admcollingwood We already have such a system. Most of our Japanese cars are made in America. Most if not all of the major German makers have plants here. The major difference is they aren’t in Michigan they are elsewhere. South Carolina for example has a lot of car factories

Trumpenomics made any sense for the blue collar worker, it was to erect tariff barriers, create favourable environments for US manufacturers, and then invite hyper efficient foreign manufacturers to build in the US. This encourages reindustrialisation while forcing US manufacturers to learn and compete with global best practices. I think it makes intuitive sense. So US carmakers can weep all they want: their cars in general suck. Few Europeans want a Made in America car, with their slapdash fitting standards, janky steering, monstrously inefficient engines, and sub-par finishing. The Europeans invited the Japanese to make cars in Europe during the 1980s. It helped us a lot, and did great things for the North East of England via Nissan. Why couldn't BYD do likewise in Michigan?

@eugyppius1 MAGA ppl think the EU is run by Progressives, full of arrogance and elitism. Showcased by the Germans snickering when Trump 1 warned them about dependence on Rus oil. MAGA ppl hate that the EU looks down on them while pursuing suicidal social and economic policies. It’s revenge.

fanfiction about a US-Russia alliance to destroy Europe shows once again that a lot of the MAGA commentariat has come to regard “Europeans” as their greatest enemies - greater even than their genuine geopolitical rivals.

@AaronBastani From my understanding its not due to Chinese labor costs, it’s because their environmental regulations are less stringent. Building these things is incredibly damaging to the local environment. To do it in the west would require so many safeguards it’s unprofitable

Last year global solar capacity grew by 511 GW, far more than the 116 GW growth in fossil fuel capacity. 9 in every 10 solar panels, globally, is made in China. 75% of lithium ion batteries are made in China. The extent to which Beijing is winning is ridiculous 🤣

@CharlotteAlter Our current elite are very low quality. Dunno why exactly. The elites of old did want to improve the nation and its people. Now they buy yachts instead of building parks or monuments. The self serving ones started training programs for their companies, now they import labor.

During the last Gilded Age, the robber barons saw a cultural value to founding universities, museums, concert halls, foundations. Many enduring institutions were founded by the ultra-rich of the 1890 who felt a sense of noblesse oblige that was also socially rewarded. Not anymore. These people see little social value to founding anything that doesn’t make a profit.

@philippilk @magyarpeterMP There have been a handful of these articles this week and the last. Titles like “5 things the EU can do if Orban wins”. Despite this the article still cites a poll saying the opposition is 9 points ahead. The press is priming the public for an Orban victory.

Brussels continue to seed the opposition’s loss narrative in Hungary. Internal polls tell them @magyarpeterMP has no chance. They’ll push for protests after the election saying it was “free but not fair” - exact wording. 🇭🇺🗳️

@MartinSkold2 It’s like how the British gave up their empire. The people and, increasingly the establishment, are tired of it. The benefits are dubious and the costs are great. Let the world deal with its own problems we’ll deal with our hemisphere

Recriminations aside, if you see all of this - the NATO breakup, the Gulf, the re-focus on the Americas, etc - not merely as the breakup of the American Empire but an admission that it -doesn’t work anymore-…a lot makes sense. To borrow from the anthropologist Joseph Tainter (whom I cite somewhat frequently, as some people know): Complex societies collapse when their constituents decide they aren’t worth maintaining anymore. From our perspective, we now have a what a Marxist would call a fatal contradiction: The borrowing that the US world order sustains has left us too indebted to be able to fight without the markets exploding, and the deindustrialization created by the petrodollar, via the structural current account deficit it creates, has left us unable to defend it any longer. And even as Americans are tired of footing the bill for it, the client states it sustains are only going to step up when they have no other option. Centralized societies collapse when “Every man for himself” starts to sound like a -good- thing.

I had some fear of this last year but no longer. If Open were to be bailed out, Google, Meta, and Elon would be pretty upset about that. Elon has personal beef with Open and still holds some sway. Although some of these companies may realize that if the circular finance of Open stops, then the house of cards collapses. While David Sacks is a bit over optimistic about LLMs, he does know what’s going on in the industry and isn’t a fan of bailouts. Quite a few finance and tech people in the admin are savvy as well. The biggest wild card is probably Jensen Huang. Google and Meta are designing their own chips to cut his chips out of the equation or at least lessen their dependency on them. NVIDIA toned down their own investment in Open but he certainly wants them to keep buying his products. He may make the argument to Trump that it would be no different to the Intel bailout which has made the gov some money so far

The whole Open AI thing is at risk of falling apart. God grant that DJT isn't stupid enough to bail it out.

@flowrmeadow @feelsdesperate The Mets are on the upswing so their fans come out. These guys attempting to psychologically analyze it is silly. As you say if they really wanted to be a fan of lovable losers they would become jets fans. However nobody wants that amount of misery

@feelsdesperate Something strange about how they always choose the Mets but not Jets or Nets

The Mets are the team downwardly mobile mopey Brooklyn wordcels obviously prefer. Why is that? Because the Mets have a working class patina wordcels love? Because they’re ‘lovable losers’ who generate affection despite lack of success? It’s an interesting question.

@skibidiquasar @eugyppius1 It only makes his story more tragic. He wants desperately to help us but he doesn’t understand land geography well enough

@seanathanp @eugyppius1 He is going the wrong way if he's trying to reach Brussels. That's his whole problem.

Horst the world's biggest whale dumbass is stuck again on another sandbank. FUCK FUCK FUCK.

@RossBarkan If you were neutral and went to a game at Yankees stadium then one at citi you would probably turn out a Mets fan. Yankee stadium looks like a mausoleum. If you told someone the Babe was buried in there they’d believe you. Citi has more fun stuff for fans as well. Yankees fan btw

Walk the streets of Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bushwick, Ridgewood, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Prospect Heights. Find a baseball fan who moved to NYC as an adult. Vast majority are Mets fans.

@jeffisrael25 It’s more a problem with public transit than the stadium itself. Public trains in the northeast spend more $ per rider and the rider usually spends more $ per ride than anywhere else in the world. Most public trains the in EU and Asia were profitable pre covid.

making a 70,000 seat stadium 30 miles from a city sort of makes sense when it's in use 8-10 times a year, but it's really not great when you want the stadium to be a year-round destination.

@isaiah_bb Minus the elections, which is a dumb idea, this already exists it’s called college sports at state schools.

Professional sports franchises should be publicly owned corporations owned by the cities they play in, and coaches and executives should be elected positions.

@WDS_Eagle @isaiah_bb The old adage “if you listen to the fans you will soon be sitting among them”

@isaiah_bb elected coaches is actually the most brilliantly awful idea ever

@CntrOfGrvty @ryangrim If kids making jokes about topics that adults think are serious is unhealthy, then I would love to know what you would consider a healthy response. I think the overuse of the word trauma is unhealthy, and disrespectful to those who have truly terrible things happen to them.

@seanathanp @ryangrim Is any of that healthy? Like even remotely? No, you're only proving the point further.

The group chat for 6th grade girls at a public school in DC is now called "Epstein's Pit Crew" according to a source on the chat, who also lives at my house. Today's kids are consistently metabolizing trauma through very dark comedy.

@AkkadSecretary Most of that 3.9 is tax. Without tax a gallon of gasoline is cheaper than a gallon of milk. That being said I feel for the rest of the world. Most of the USA doesn’t want this war either. Since the gov stopped funding various orgs there aren’t even any protests to go to. Sad!

In Thailand fuel is being rationed Australia is fucked Europe is ~$11 a gallon Meanwhile in Florida its $3.9 or £0.77 a liter. Americans simply are not feeling the real effects of this war, most you get is a grumble about price whilst the rest of the world dies.

@chriswithans Income taxes and inheritance taxes were pushed by southern democrats seeking to punish northern industrialists for grudges going back to the civil war. Most of the time gov policy is about helping friends and punishing enemies, not sensible decisions.

The obvious wealth and inheritance tax compromise is to just eliminate the inheritance tax entirely and have heirs inherit the original cost basis for anything they inherit. You inherit a home that's now worth $3 million? You should inherit the original $300,000 (or whatever) cost basis. In other words, let capital gains be uniform for everyone's assets.

@JTAlexander_ The conflation of modern liberal views and the situation in the late republic is where a lot of these moronic takes spring from. Empire = bad because senate = republic and republic = democracy and democracy = good.

I dislike the *meme* of Roman History, because while many people know gists and vibes, they don't seem to know the particulars. A good litmus test is one's view of the Late Republic. If someone speaks fondly of the Late Republic, they are most likely either a rube or projecting. Our Founders, for example, projected their Enlightenment views onto a Republic that held virtually zero of those views. (See pic related; in this instance I don't apply it only to modern Leftists, but Classical Liberals in general.) Caesar didn't just appear out of nowhere. The only truly unprecedented things Caesar did was cross the Rhine and the English Channel. He wasn't even the first to "cross the Rubicon" in his own lifetime. If you know the detailed history of the Republic, rather than act like its final demise was some tragedy forced by the tyrannical mad dog known as Gaius Julius Caesar, you'd recognize that it was a terminally sick institution in the midst of collapse that was ultimately *saved* by Caesar's consolidation of power, his leaving it to the Triumvirate, and then Octavian's re-consolidation of that power into one supreme First Citizen. The Principate didn't create some new Office of the Emperor. Octavian consolidated power that already existed in various forms so that rather than a bunch of guys fighting civil wars over and over, which were frequent events, there was some stability. This stability led to the most widespread period of peace the world would know for more than a thousand years in either direction. If you consider this a bad outcome, then you're just not a serious interlocutor.

@AaronBastani I visited England in like 2007 and I was shocked at how prevalent American companies were. Nikes, coca cola, fast food, posters for the transformer movie, reruns of American TV shows, etc. I can’t imagine that the UK has less American influences than nearly 20 years ago

“…completely imaginary American influence” All our payment systems, digital systems and social media platforms are basically American owned. My favourite example: Starbucks, Costs and Nero….all owned by…Americans! It’s so much worse than you think.