1. By a show of hands, who was surprised that the cataclysmic warnings of the weekend subsided into talk of diplomacy on Monday?
2. Let’s hypothesize the US gov’t or allies did pre-release this info to traders as a policy tool, inviting them to sell oil profitably, shaping the later price action . In a practical sense they may have brought more speculators to the short side than otherwise would have been there; is that scenario really beyond the pale?
3. News of war and sovereign relations on an international stage necessarily will test the boundaries of traditional law of confidentiality and fair practices.
The US would not win a ground war in Iran. Before every US war, people tend to think the US military and their $800 billion/year budget are unbeatable. But look at outcomes of significant US ground wars since WWII - only one clear victory:
* Korea: Stalemate, which is still a problem now 70
years later
* Vietnam: Loss
* Gulf War: Victory
* Afganistan: Loss, after 20 years of fighting
* Iraq: Mixed results after 8 years: Saddam Hussein threat
eliminated, Iran and ISIS made significant gains
Iran is larger and has more people and resources than Afghanistan and Iraq combined. Terrain in Iran is a game world-builder's fantasy of defensibility:
Iran is far more capable militarily than Iraq and Afghanistan and, particulary, their military may be world's the leading experts on assymetric warfare; they train everyone else - Hezbollah, the Houthis, etc. Their proxies held off the US military and allies in Iraq, a neighboring country, where Iran had far less motivation than to defend their own homes from a US invasion.
The US could win given unlimited political will and time, but it would be very costly and anyway, the US couldn't sustain that will for much easier situations in the prior two wars. Nobody is crazy enough to launch a ground invasion of Iran, I hope.
All the lost wars had very vague objectives. A war where you try to fight a military while trying to “liberate” the population in the same area basically can’t succeed. In WW2 they bombed the hell out of Japan and Germany and after the war they were the winners who set the course. They were also lucky that Germany and Japan were functioning societies that didn’t have much violent infighting. In Gulf War 1 there was a clear objective to get Iraq out of Kuwait.
All the other wars depended on installing a friendly and competent government that would take over. That is a very hard thing to do. It’s too easy to support a friendly government that’s also corrupt and incompetent.
In Iran it will be the same problem after military victory. The US doesn’t want to run the show so what’s next? Nobody knows and it will take years to see where this is going. I hope they don’t destroy too much infrastructure there so people can rebuild quickly and society goes back to some normal.
If think assume too much competence. I'm sure there are various plans (ok maybe not with this "administration", their "plans" seems to be fast-forward grift) but I have very little confidence in them going in any particular direction.
>> The war should not be won. it should be ended before everyone loses.
My analysis and my comment I linked to agrees. And that is a strategic victory for Iran, Russia, China and a defeat for Israel, and the US. The worst will be the Gulf States hostages of their dueling stock pile of defense missiles running out...to which they will have to queue for, with US DOD at the front of the queue.
Let me repeat: They are about to annex a sovereign nation while reducing the capital city to rubble. May or may not remind you of another country further north.
It would remind me of that if Ukraine attacked first... over and over again throughout the last decades... together with it's allies in the region... occasionally abducting a few hundred Russia civilians... there is no parallel here.
Israel has been bombing (and conducting raids in?) Lebanon for years. They attacked Hezbollah's ally, Iran. And Hezbollah has been attacking Israel for years. It's not true that the conflict began with Hezbollah's recent actions.
and the parties that initiated it know that. they actually have no interest in geo-strategic goals. they are interested only in selfish commercial ones.
The US is an oil exporting country and the people pulling the puppet strings of the dominant party in power directly benefit from high oil prices.
Further, oligarchical political-economic structures also benefit from "chaos is a ladder" scenarios where their privileged knowledge and access to decision makers gives them the ability to benefit from every new conflagration. The insider trading examples are only the trip of the iceberg.
The "war" will wind down after they've made their profits and redistributed the wealth and control as they set out to do.
Gone are the days where ruling elites benefited from international commercial stability. Those with power right now want chaos, and they will continue to create it until they are held to account.
Note that all of above applies just as well to the rulers of Iran as it does to the United States. It is the people who suffer, not the elites.
I think you’re just seeing the logic of US defense by offense, and the reason why the excursion was launched as it was three weeks ago.
If you step back, in 1979 Iran launched a revolution that had an avowed goal of “death to America”. If the Iranians play the kinetic scenario to the bitter end, they simply are demonstrating this was not mere poetry and there never was any other off-ramp, just tactically deciding at what relative strength these two systems will collide.
So Iran loses by demonstrating irrational resolve in antisocial tactics, like firing missiles randomly at neutral neighbors, which is the same precondition you take as gating victory. Conflicts are played out in the real world specifically to resolve inconsistent modeling like this held by different sides, and all parties would be well served by finding a better way to resolve the conflicting modeling here, because the most likely scenario currently is that everyone loses.
> If you step back, in 1979 Iran launched a revolution that had an avowed goal of “death to America”. If the Iranians play the kinetic scenario to the bitter end, they simply are demonstrating this was not mere poetry and there never was any other off-ramp, just tactically deciding at what relative strength these two systems will collide.
Step back further and you see that they were overthrowing a dictator that the US had installed over their democratically elected government.
If you take a step back even further, perhaps you don't bomb a girls school three times because someone 47 years ago said something mean about your country and then never followed up.
Which country is engaging in antisocial behaviors again? I can't keep it straight. Is it the country that started an unprovoked war or the country defending themselves?
The Iraq-Iran war, in the eighties....who had Iran lining up a million soldiers in battle, for eight years, has shown Iran is ready for a level of endurance, the US cant even imagine.
The same scenario played out in Vietnam. The US could never succeed because:
- the enemy was intermingled with the "friendly" civilians, and they couldn't be told apart, leading to everyone being treated brutally and potential friends becoming enemies
- the enemy was prepared to fight to the death, for years if need be, and knew they could outlast US public opinion
- the enemy knew they could prevail because of centuries of history defeating much larger opponents (in Vietnam's case, of them previously defeating France and China).
All of these same conditions would be present in a ground war in Iran, with some religious fanaticism thrown in on top.
- the enemy had plenty of material, technical and financial support from adversarial superpowers who were all too happy to see American lives, money and military resources wasted.
That external support is not fully scaled up yet (despite clear reports of Russian intelligence support for Iran), but you can bet it would be in the event of a major ground assault, occupation, and/or counter-insurgency quagmire.
The hatred has been there since the 70s, at the very least. Watched a great video on Iran from Rick Steves filmed in 2009, and when he visited a mosque there was a large sign calling for the death of America and Israel.
Iran can block the Strait of Hormuz indefinitely. They are demanding war reparations from the United States. Since Trump won't do that, the best case scenario seems to be that one or more third parties - Europe, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc. - offer(s) Iran a package of financial incentives and security assurances which convince Iran to end the war.
If only Muad'dib were here. He could find a way through.
Not traders. Friends and family. These guys are idiots who figure they will all be pardoned before Trump leaves office, or part of the junta that replaces him if he doesn’t leave office.
It might in theory be great to have an AI bot do this for all links of known paywalled sites if a good quality free alternative is available and discoverable by the AI bot. The bot could use the web search tool of an LLM service for this purpose. If not available, it could keep rechecking every fibonacci hour for up to 21 hours.
It doesn't have to be that way. An allowlist of domains can be built over time. Also, the bot's suggestions can initially be vetted by a human. As for prompt injection, there are ways to mitigate the risk using roles and input validation, but I guess AI haters will be haters.
Many of us use site analytics software that can watch what our users are doing in our apps. Also, Truth Social has a feature where you can schedule a post (that feature is part of the upgraded "partriot package".) Either one of these features might have the truth social staff getting early access to the president's truuts.
- Pakistan has a defense treaty with Saudi Arabia.
- Saudi Arabia has been attacked.
- Witkoff claims to negotiate with Iranians in Pakistan and Iran denies it. Witkoff has a horrible track record in that either the negotiations fail or are a precursor to attacks.
- What better way to spend time in Pakistan than to recruit a proxy and promise US money to the cash-strapped government?
That’s a parody account. I mean this in the nicest way possible, but if you cannot tell this is parody within the first two sentences then you should be very careful when reading twitter. This is a common format and other accounts are far more pernicious. My feed in the morning often starts with a dozen parodies or outright falsehoods with no community note.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they “let” it happen by optimizing for double clickthrough engagement produced by the inevitable “grok is this true?” at the top of every thread.
The worst part is that the only way to develop immunity to, and pattern recognition for, these parody accounts is to subject yourself to them repeatedly. So the people who can recognize the fake tweets the quickest are also the people who read them the most. And there are plenty who never develop the pattern recognition…
Poe’s Law meets The Big Short’s convergence of confessing and bragging[1]. It adds up to being completely opaque in terms of veracity and intent, but either way it highlights the real problem at the center of this story.
is anyone else really starting to get fucking tired of this bullshit? yes, it is not an unprecedented, nor unique, phenomenon, but, like, it just feels so blatant. and i say this as someone who doesn’t reflexively hate everything trump does. i do, of course, dislike most things he does, but i do so in what i consider to be a fairly sympathetic and open-minded way. but this is just, like… kleptocracy, no?
Yes I’ve been tired of the bullshit for a while. We’re living in one of the most overtly corrupt government regimes in the United States history. We’ve elected the practical equivalent to Al Capone. Meanwhile, homelessness has never been higher. Rent, food, gas, electricity, healthcare, and so on have never been higher. All while jobless rates are increasing, salaries are decreasing, benefits cut. Richer is getting richer. At what point does the scale tip?
The Martha Stewart and Mark Cuban cases were more or less the same -- a non-insider investor was given information from an insider, sold their stock to avoid a loss, and were then investigated for it.
The thing is - insider trading is illegal but it's poorly defined.
Martha Stewart wasn't convicted of insider trading - she was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to a federal investigator.
Mark Cuban wasn't convicted of insider trading either. He wasn't convicted at all. He kept his mouth shut and the jury found him not guilty of insider trading.
She was sent to prison for lying and trying to cover up her insider trading. If she had just admitted and accepted the punishment, it would have been just a financial penalty.
Her blunder was thinking she was too special (or too rich?... she wasn't really that rich) to have to deal with the laws, so she tried to scheme her way around the punishment.
As I recall, her insider trade only made or saved her something like $64k. That's laughably small, and the final punishment to her would have been little more than a slap on the wrist had she not blown it up by lying and cheating to avoid the original punishment.
I hear this a lot, but she did deserve to be punished. Her defense tried to act like she innocently and accidentally sold some stock based on something a friend told her, but they neglect to mention that she her career started as a stock broker and as such should have been familiar with regulations, and she was on the New York Stock Exchange’s board of directors during the scandal.
It's not some innocent mom who accidentally listened to some advice, she really should have known better.
She was targeted because James Comey wanted to leverage her fame for his own career advancement. Not justifying what she did, but it’s no coincidence that she got roped.
It's why WTI crude never exceeds $100/barrel. Every time it gets that high the insider in the administration shorts it and the administration announces a new policy delaying more strikes.
That’s how it worked 10 years ago, that’s not really how it works now. The wildcat shale drillers of a decade ago all went bankrupt when prices fell, and lost a bunch of money for their investors. They’ve since all been bought up by larger firms with way more capital discipline, who don’t ramp up drilling just because prices have a little spike, especially when we all know that TACO. Do not expect shale drilling to soften the blow of oil price increases this time.
You don't even need to trade oil, trading gulf country assets also works well. And rebuilding the gulf should be quite profitable if Iran blows it up and the assets will be available cheap.
Sure. If you go back 80 years and past several pointless wars you can find one example. Wherein the USA fought with a world wide coalition to defeat the Nazi's only after war had been declared by the Nazi's against the USA.
Actually, you can just look in Iraq, and CNOOC, PetroChina, and Zhongman. Companies will benefit, just not American ones.
And the US will clearly have failed to protect allies and project force in the Gulf. If the bulk of OPEC moves to a basket currency trade to ally more with PRC, India, and Russia that will be an astonishing failure.
I wouldn't have thought even Trump and this Republican administration was incompetent enough to break the petrodollar, but here we are, just one year in.
Also, don't look at fracking production curves. Bakken and Eagle Ford are foreshadowing the Permian.
I can see this war being mismanaged enough that gulf countries go to sell in yuans straight. After all, aligning with china will prevent further attacks from iran and almost all the stuff being made in the world already sells in yuans.
I'm not smart enough to understand why - but surely this isn't sustainable? At some point wont the price not reflect the reality of simply not having gas to put in your car? What is going on... The price of oil went down 10% yesterday, opened +0% today and is back to +4%...
It is very difficult to ship and store oil in the volumes that are relevant to modern economies. We are very much in a situation where some regions are business as usual, some regions can't get oil at any cost, and some regions have so much oil they are stopping production because they don't have any where to store it.
In terms of how this impacts prices, the headline number is usually Brent crude, but there are a number of different "flavors" with various geopolitical factors that influence price[1]. For example, the US market is going to respond differently then the Indian market. The former is a net exporter halfway across the globe from the conflict area, the later gets a substantial portion of their oil through the Strait of Hormuz.
If the conflict carries on for a while things will probably normalize across markets as production and shipping adjust to the new reality. But in the short term you are going to have some folks mildly inconvenienced by slightly higher prices, while other folks might not even be able to fill their tanks.
Most oil benchmarks are futures contracts, so they don’t reflect the spot or current price. So commodities traders are trying to predict the situation 2-4 weeks from now
If you look at this as market manipulation as a method of generating (investment) returns, then it doesn't matter if your public lie only causes the prices to change for a day or two. As long as your people get in in the right direction before your announcement, and then get out right after the big swing, you win.
Who cares what the real price is, right? - especially when you've never pumped you own gas into your car, and you are so out of touch with normal life that you think life insurance costs $15 or $20 (I believe those were the numbers he threw out a few years ago on an interview.)
It's beyond simple supply and demand. This was in response to a social media post that had a tenuous relationship with reality (or 'fluid' as the Whitehouse now calls it).
Oil price is famously disconnected from how much is being pumped out of the ground at any given time. But eventually, yes, if the conflict lasts for long enough material reality will catch up with markets (or is it the other way around?).
I'm growing pessimistic that this kind of activity + the egregious presidential-level crypto scams will never see justice. What's the path for that, really?
It's not that complicated. Elect a Democrat in 2028 who will nominate a strong AG, not a useless ditherer like Garland. What a disgraceful tenure he had. If he was going to take so long to bring charges he should have just avoided it. Instead he takes 3 years to bring all these charges which naturally look like election interference and as such are paused until they choke the election away and the new justice department kills all the cases.
Don't elect a geriatric compromise candidate. The current administration's excesses create a massive opportunity for a pendulum swing. It's really not that hard. Hold yourself, your neighbors, your family and your friends accountable for who they vote for. And as tempting as it is, don't give into cynicism. It will take work but change for the better is always possible, and really in America, is far less out of reach than it would often seem.
Doesn't matter whom you elect, at least not as far as righting wrongs. You might prevent more egregious wrongs from happening, but convincing Congress to return to rule of law is impossible when Congress is almost entirely funded by the same powerful interests who chose to put a lunatic in charge.
You're also up against a large population which has been brainwashed, and even if someone deprogrammed is still not intellectually capable of reasoning beyond their own immediate interests. In other words, a democracy where ignorant people can vote is ultimately doomed to look quite like what we have now.
> Elect a Democrat in 2028 who will nominate a strong AG
Impossible. Democratic Party power is concentrated into a gerontocracy mostly interested in preserving their own wealth/power.
Appeasement and encouragement of status quo will be the result of any Democrat victory.
Of course all this Trump shit is good precedent for them to use similar tactics to line their pockets next time.
“It’s not that complicated. Give up your principles for short term house cleaning.”
People with strong political beliefs are going to turn their head to keep their side in power rather than put someone in power that will push policies they are fundamentally against.
Blagojevich was not replaced by a Republican.
At this point presidential elections are won by getting members of the other side to stay home. So encourage young people to get out and vote if you want a Democrat. Don’t waste your breath telling someone who cares about gun rights to vote for a Democrat.
What kind of reply is that? Nevermind the questionable style of making up a sentence and putting it in quotation marks, what about the comment you're replying to suggests giving up any principles?
Why are you appending a sentence I never said within your quote of my position?
Your comment reads like you are arguing with yourself. I never suggested anything to the contrary of much of what you write, so frankly I have no idea what point you are trying to make. I suggest you re-read my comment in full as I think we are predominantly in agreement.
Is this supposed to be an intelligent comment? Is your answer to forgo elections ahead of time? You plan for the worst outcome by already accepting it as reality?
Why don't you work on lobbying your grandparents and their vote because I seriously doubt you are equipped for whatever armed conflict you are imagining. Have some dignity. If Americans are so called upon to defend the constitution then so be it, there is no need to prematurely soil your pants about it.
People often in essence say "I think the odds of [the alternate option(s)] are greater than are being represented". It can be helpful to frame it that way, rather than "I will over-react to what I feel is an over-reaction".
I generally agree, but this time his VP isn't going to defect and he's been building ICE into a republican guard loyal only to him, so I think you can't just completely say "well it failed last time so it'll fail again"
Yep, might not have liked a lot of what Mike Pence stood for but he was at least willing to operate with humility. He always took the honest route ecen if you disagreed with his views.
Vance however, I dont see much of that in action. But time will tell. Folks like to think it is a quiet conspiracy but every time you get a glimpse inside workings of government, if feels like they hate each other more than the next guy, regardless of who is in power.
I think it's likely that they'll see justice in a chaotic way, ie not connected to the specific crime. Most likely outcome is that they make huge paper profits that are then absolutely worthless because the dollar collapses and the property rights that enforce the wealth they gained from these transactions disappear as the government is toppled. Another likely outcome is that they get in the habit of doing criminal things that piss people off, piss the wrong person off, and then get offed.
There was an AskHistorians post about the French revolution a few years ago that really stuck with me:
> Stability had hardly been a hallmark of the Revolution til that point, and really what we have seen is a revolving door of men rising to the summit of power, only to realize that once your head is above the rest it's a prime target for the guillotine. Of the early years of the Revolution, virtually any man who had been considered a leader was either dead or in exile. The King was executed in January of 1793. The Girondin, formerly indistinguishable from the 'left,' went en masse to the guillotine in October 1793. Danton & friends (dubbed by Robespierre 'the indulgents'), the literal authors of the Insurrection of August 10th which overthrew the King and declared the Republic, the 'giant of the Revolution,' had been executed in April 1794. Interspersed with these prominent deaths were hundreds of individuals who had been important players in the Revolution, whether in national or local politics, and who had now paid the price for their notoriety
In times of crisis and scarcity, the usual outcome is that anyone whose ego is big enough to think that he can lead or profit finds that they become a target for elimination. The folks who survive are the ones who focus on, well, surviving. We're headed for one of those times of crisis now, though most people don't want to admit it, and a lot of the people who are profiting off ill-gotten gains now may find that they don't live to enjoy it simply because it gives them a taste for profiteering that eventually makes them take stupid risks.
> and a lot of the people who are profiting off ill-gotten gains now may find that they don't live to enjoy it simply because it gives them a taste for profiteering that eventually makes them take stupid risks
They believe, rightly or not that they can withdraw from the world with their wealth more or less in one piece to some kind of safe zone.
> Most likely outcome is that they make huge paper profits that are then absolutely worthless because the dollar collapses
Seems like it'd be pretty easy to diversify into inflation-protected assets after taking big profits.
But I also don't see the dollar collapsing any time soon. The dollar's strength is built on the US economy, and the US economy is still one of the strongest in the world, with high productivity per person. We'll see some inflation, sure, but nothing that the rich insider traders can't hedge against.
I do not expect that there will be any real justice here. They're not gutting the average American -- they're bleeding us, extracting a small enough amount of value that they can get away with it. And we don't live in a just world.
I think this is a big part of both the impact of globalization and the U.S's waning power. Back around 1950, right after WW2, the "first world" (the developed west, not including Russia or Warsaw Pact countries) had a total population of just over 500M, and the U.S. was 150M of those, just under 1/3. And the remainder were largely dependent upon U.S. capital, machinery, and technology, having just bombed each other back to pre-industrial times.
Today, the developed world is about 3-4B people, and the U.S. is 350M of them, less than 10%. China alone has lifted about 500M people out of poverty and into the middle class in the last 2 decades, a population larger than the total population of the middle class in the U.S. The population of Asia is around 4.86B, 15x the size of the United States, and an increasingly large number of them are living a lifestyle close to what Americans enjoy.
I believe the dollars strength is built on its unassailability as the petrodollar and foreign reserve currency, which lets the fed set interest rates and print money while creating less inflation than any other currency. The world looks very very different when energy markets aren’t fulfilled in dollars in ways that most citizens won’t understand.
That’s false. The petrodollar is irrelevant because two non-US companies trading using an intermediate currency like the USD create a balanced buy and sell of the intermediary.
But why is Iran insisting the Chinese Yuan be used? Because they're idiots?
Because Petrodollars make our global economy work, and Iran wants their partner China to be in control! If Americans lose sight of their need to maintain their role as *THE* lingua franca of international trade, then all hell is lost. The US cannot afford its military without massive consequences if it can't raise extraordinarily cheap debt through purchases of oil in US dollars immediately turned around to buy US debt to maintain that money's value.
>Seems like it'd be pretty easy to diversify into inflation-protected assets after taking big profits.
Assets are yours only as long as there's a government to enforce your ownership rights over those assets for you. In case of government or societal collapse, your physical assets then are free for the taking to the ones with the most men with the most guns, and your paper assets are worthless.
Hidden profiteering off ill-gotten gains happens continously. In some areas it becomes more known or suspected, but because beheadings and such are very far outside the Overton Window that is mostly controlled by the media, the focus of society moves on as the media directs.
> because the dollar collapses and the property rights that enforce the wealth they gained from these transactions disappear as the government is toppled.
sorry but this is such a coping mechanism, or doomsday talking. Neither is dollar collapsing nor US government is collapsing, as there has been no evidence whatsoever of any of that even moving towards happening, at least on any meaningfully predictable timescale (i.e. 3-5 years? while even that's rich for predictions). Anything past that is just broken clock being correct.. at some point in time.
What would it take for dollar to "collapse"? What are the exact mechanisms that would be required to start that process?
What is the evidence of US government being "toppled" with layers and layers and layers of diverse (financial, legal, military, political, social, you name it) protections in place? It's the kind of thing preppers like to dream of but it's not happpening in our lifetimes.
When things of that scale happen you see it YEARS in advance in true poverty (as in people starving), in anger (as in people getting increasingly violent) at scale, in mass mobilization of masses actually looking to topple the government. Nobody is working right now to overthrow US government, there were never any organized attempts at that, not even demonstrations of a vector that can once lead there, as in it's simply not happening (sorry you can't in all seriousness put Jan 6 there as that was shocking for US political PR, but shockingly irrelevant for any country that has gone through real upheaval). US is extraordinarily rich even in it's poor version, everyone has everything to lose and nothing meaningful to gain from any "revolution".
> What is the evidence of US government being "toppled" with layers and layers and layers of diverse (financial, legal, military, political, social, you name it) protections in place?
I mean.
Do you read the news?
these protections are not working very well these days. the administration is getting away with _so much_ criminality in plain view.
Revolution, not election. We need a new governance framework in the US. I believe it’s genuinely silly to think this type of activity is limited to one party or one administration or that it is new.
I believe the Constitution and related artefacts should be stored in the British Museum with other historical documents. Civic religion needs to be done away with.
Well, local history in the US, judged by most current Americans, would probably say the current system is better than the previous one, and the current one spawned from a revolution. Maybe the second (third?) time it'll incrementally improve at least.
The Revolution allowed a new system to be built, but it is a teleological fallacy to point to the current system as the result. Centuries of trial, error, and institutional hardening led to the system current Americans would judge.
The first post-revolution organizational system of the US, described in the Articles of Confederation, is very different than the difficult and contingent pivot to a federal system. Almost a million US citizens died in the transition.
The current system is the result of hundreds of years of gradual democratization and economic development, not the revolution. For an example of the US without the American Revolution, look at Canada. They’re doing fine. Here in the US, the Revolution didn’t cause life to change at all for the vast majority of people.
Whether the majority of people believe that or not has more to do with the place of the Revolution in our national mythology than with what actually happened in reality.
No matter how much you hate Communists, you must admit the fall of the USSR was catastrophic in terms of quality of life and life expectancy. All the public goods and services were sold off en masse and children were driven to prostitution to avoid starvation.
~30 years later all the quick investors of the privatization run the country and have been sending all their able bodied men into a drone-based meat grinder with no end in sight.
"Almost every" is a very strong statement. But even granted that, the interregnum periods (civil wars and revolutions) tend to be so horrific that they are wise to avoid. In fact, people like Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes who lived through revolutions tended to come to the cynical conclusion that any system of government was better than a civil war. I don't agree with that conclusion, but I'd rather see the system reform itself than jump immediately to "tear up the constitution and start over"
Not GP, but I think there are a few things that could be done either through a complete re-write of the constitution or through amendments if that process somehow becomes tenable again.
1. Massively increase the size of congress. Modern technology makes this feasible in a way that it wasn't when the size was capped. More congress critters means it's harder to buy off a majority of them.
2. Re-write the first amendment to significantly limit political speech. The specifics of this are obviously very thorny, but reversing Citizens United and drastically limiting the amount of money that is spent on elections is necessary to have _any_ chance of saving the country.
I agree with 1. 2 is more of a reform of current law rather than an amendment. I would like to see the 17th amendment repealed also. Capping representatives greatly skewed the distribution of power in congress. The balance of congressional power was harmed equally by making senators popularly elected instead of appointed by state legislatures to represent the state government.
> 1. Massively increase the size of congress. Modern technology makes this feasible in a way that it wasn't when the size was capped. More congress critters means it's harder to buy off a majority of them.
1 is something I've been saying for a while. One rep for every 35k residents was the count at one point, right? I hear it's something like one for every 800k now. And constituency shouldn't be based on geography; if the most important issue to me is whatever, I should be able to fill my ranked-choice ballot with candidates that support Whatever. We can work out the mechanics, but the point would be to have a legislative body where each rep had 35k distinct names behind them.
2 is dicey and I would like to try campaign finance reform first.
I don't want to throw everything out because that's how you get slavery and The Handmaid's Tale. At the same time, I'll gladly acknowledge that a lot of our institutions were rotten from the founding and to their core, and their dismantling maybe not necessary but certainly suitable for a reborn America that leaves much of its baggage behind.
2 is campaign finance reform. The only meaningful campaign finance reform is going to come with limits on political speech. Otherwise you just get the same amount of spend with even more of it being funneled through PACs.
Campaign finance reform gets rid of private financing of PACs and Super PACS altogether. You might call that limiting speech, and I guess it is, in a way, but it's not a restriction for its own sake, but rather to emphasize that actual main reform: public financing (and necessarily limited).
We particularly need a momentary repeal of double jeopardy to get justice for Epsteins victims. I don't care what the implications are, or the precedent. What he did was unprecedented. Retry gelane on rape and espionage, invalidate the non prosecution agreement for the 25 co conspirators, and convict Jeffrey in absentia in case he ever turns up.
I have accepted that a lot of effort has been put into making sure these people never see justice and they probably won't. I put my energy into strengthening democracy and institutions for the next generation so they have the opportunity to do better than we have.
Realistically I think it will come down to the aggrieved counterparties here. Who was on the losing side of the money, was it Joe Schmoe day trader or a bunch of funds who lost their shirt?
If it’s the hedge funds or institutional money, you can absolutely be sure this will come to a head. People don’t like being taken for a ride, and if they are repeatedly taken for a ride and they are organized market participants they will come around and make sure there is a comeuppance as a collective
You are completely right. There are no avenues to seek justice here because the levers of power control the justice. And if the holders of power change, they won't spend political capital on this kind of thing. It's free crime.
Record and wait. Justice is slow but has the power of the nation state. Once the leadership of this current government is gone and nobody is around to protect the offenders then its time to swoop in with the records and the justice system.
This is why its risky to join corrupt political movements led by old men, because they will use you to break the law, then die and you'll be on the hook. Much like the people who worked for the Soviets in the Baltics post war as young staffers, who administered the forced deportations and were eventually prosecuted ~50 years later for genocide or crimes against humanity.
i.e. everyone working for ICE today should be agitating for a pardon, given how racial profiling and warrentless raids are probably rather illegal in the long run.
> Record and wait. Justice is slow but has the power of the nation state.
this is pretty much how things will unfold in USA. Everything that has to happen will happen but very slowly. There is all the evidence supporting that.
I think one of the things that goes unmentioned in these discussions is that while the US gets a lot of attention for this kind of activity, it has also (historically) been in the forefront of criminalization and prosecution. I may be wrong, but don't know of any other jurisdiction that prosecuted insider trading before the Eighties, and the US has had a pattern of investigating and regulating this since the 30s.
I don't think that this is a particular form of exceptionalism, beyond the US having a longer tradition of widespread, retail-owned shares, and law-making around that fact.
But sometimes I wonder when people are criticising the US as a culture, they're often choosing as the baseline that should be respected standards that were also defined in a US cultural context. What this sometimes means is that in internal US culture these points are seen as something that is heavily discussed, because there was a point where it was democratically decided and therefore could be undecided in the same way, like corporate personhood, or money-as-speech. In the case of the criminalization "insider trading", there is lively debate about whether this is actually a "good thing". That can sound horrific externally, because of course insider trading is a bad thing. But someone decided to make that a bad thing, and -- for historical accident reasons -- the edges of that debate was largely defined within the US.
(This is mostly just barely-informed speculation: sometimes issues like this emerge in international fora, or start in another culture and quickly spread. But the cultural and financial dominance of the US in the last century or so really makes these things often a point of debate in American terms, and a fixed point elsewhere. I speak here as an immigrant to the US and also someone who is dipped in global policy work, rather than someone who is stating this as a good or a bad thing.)
A lot of the United States historical influence and soft power comes from it being a nation of rules and laws. The credibility of the country provided a perception that it was a stable place to store value (investment in treasuries, greenbacks, etc). When the government is facilitating insider trading out in the open (repeatedly), we’re losing a lot more than money due to fraud.
Congressional hearings combined with SEC regulatory incursions.
There will never be an investigation while Trump is president, but, it's entirely feasible to force some action in the time being to enable a case later.
FYI it may not be technically illegal it depends on all sorts of things.
If trade were made public it could be very damaging.
> There will never be an investigation while Trump is president, but, it's entirely feasible to force some action in the time being to enable a case later.
And realistically we don't want that. Similar with Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, better to sit on things until Trump is out of office, so there can be no pardon.
Getting rid of the delusion of American exceptionalism in how politics is conducted. In other words, do something about the two party system, or the pardon power or any number of things, the possibilities are endless. But doing anything about it would require admitting that the USA is something other than perfect, so it’ll never happen. Too bad really.
At least the USA is only 4% of the world’s population so the world economy will just find other financial hubs and currencies, no big loss.
lol, others are saying elections to solve economic concerns. If that solves it why do you keep re-electing Republicans given this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p... sure the next election might fix it temporarily but the one after that will just just tank the economy again. Or overturn insider trading bans or issue pardons, the possibilities for chaos are endless and — fun fact - investors abhor regulatory uncertainty.
Why do we? You say this as if the country is a single organism and in lock step with the current administration. I have never voted for a republican in my life and never will, but now, somehow, all 350 million Americans just fit into one big bucket?
Because at this point all the people in all the other countries do not care who you voted for, especially not after he caused an insurrection and a Democratic Party administration didn't do anything to prosecute that. At this point all the people outside the US just want to know what you're going to be doing about this insanity.
Partly why I'm against anybody over retirement age taking office even if it is a heavy handed approach and could be seen as age discrimination.
The odds are too low of anybody getting meaningfully punished while they get to openly setup their entire family for generations using means and information not available to any normal citizen.
And while not guaranteed they are statistically more likely to suffer age related cognitive decline while still in office.
For starters, you're not alone in this feeling. A lot of us are very hungry for justice, and a lot of the Trump administrations current tactics are openly grappling with the reality of jailtime and restitution if they lose power. These are unusual times, and so people who are not usually inclined toward retribution are hungry for it.
That said, it's hard to reconcile that with the fact that Democrats continue to be the opposition party, and failed to even imprison Trump over four years for the things he'd done. And even in the best case scenario, we wouldn't expect Trump himself to live long enough to face much justice.
The optimism left in me hopes that this era can serve as an enduring cautionary tale for future societies.
The Democratic Party isn’t without its own corruption either. Pelosi is one of the best stock traders ever and there’s a reason why people voted for Trump. The border being open was criminal negligence and this isn’t just a conservative talking point cities like Seattle near the Canadian border were maxed out on services the could provide to migrants. Across the board our politicians are corrupt rule breakers, it doesn’t matter if one is worse than the other. Neither party can really prosecute the other fully because both need to see their leadership held to account and are terrified of that door opening.
>the fact that Democrats continue to be the opposition party, and failed to even imprison Trump over four years for the things he'd done
I'd like to point out it was NOT the Democrats who failed us, it was Republicans in congress who failed us. I'm really not sure how you can suggest Democrats failed us, when they had 2 successful impeachments against trump, but it was Senate Republicans that voted to not remove him when 60 votes were required in a Senate split 50/50. Every single Republican Senator except Mitt Romney in the first impeachment failed us. The second impeachment for insurrection got closer at 57 votes in the senate, but Republicans failed us again.
Democrats absolutely did not fail us, they were the ones trying to hold a criminal accountable. It was and always is Republicans who fail us.
They should be banned from trading or accepting any money whatsoever and be forced to divest from all assets.
And then to compensate they should be paid more in terms of salary, even if that salary seems absurdly large it would be less than most of them gain from the insider info they use to make deals.
Take the median income, multiply it by 5-10 and thats their salary.
There could also be a requirement for them to buy and hold (for a predetermined length of time) broad index funds that match the US Total Stocks and US Total Bond markets. They would only make money if the US as a whole makes money. It would certainly help with aligning motivations.
Elections are already being used for collectively applying "justice", just not the type that stops corruption. Instead it's right wing mob "justice" against the woke and immigrants and all the liberal tears are the prize the braying mob that voted for autocracy wants and they're happy to accept corruption as long as they don't think it affects them. Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all types we've tried.
The framers of the constitution acknowledged the flaws and vulnerabilities of democracy and cited education as a prevention mechanism for an ill informed population voting against their own best interest. It’s no coincidence that public education has been under constant assault from the right since Reagan.
Elections elected Trump twice, so what other strategy should Americans try next?
Americans have been a democracy for 200 years and have no healthcare, no public transit, a crippling drug and homeless problem, a crippling gun violence problem... The list goes on. Democracy doesn't seem to be having the desired affect there.
Why should that suddenly change? Where's this hope coming from?
Most of this intransigence is due to corruption, starting with a billionaire cabal’s influence over the supreme court. Citizens United has all but granted the power to decide elections to super PACs, and therefore to the billionaire donor class.
Unfortunately with 90% of broadcast television soon to be owned by a single family, overturning this corrupt power may be even more difficult.
I think it’s time for society as a whole to reconsider the social contract legitimizing the wealth of these oligarchs.
Zero when the president has the power to issue blanket pardons to his family and inner circle. Hell, he might even extend it fully to ICE. There's precedent too since the previous president pardoned his son for all crimes committed over a period of time.
> Hell, he might even extend it fully to ICE. There's precedent too since the previous president pardoned his son for all crimes committed over a period of time.
I love how people pretend this established some new kind of precedent.
Y'all keep forgetting Nixon.
"Now, Therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974."
Well, then we'll just have a situation where texas and Florida are safe havens for these people, and the governor will refuse to extradite them to New York or whatever to face trial
I made a face, reading this article. They present the US gov't's very large and scary liabilities and future obligations, but they don't present the other side of the picture, the future income streams. (How much can the US government realistically expect to earn annually via taxation?)
Without being able to compare future liabilities to future income, we're lacking critical context. It's like they wrote half an article; kinda frustrating.
There is no feasible scenario where tax revenues will allow the US government to pay a 39 Trillion, soon to be 40 Trillion debt. And paying the debt its not even in discussion right now.
What is in discussion, are the multiple, very feasible, and very realistic scenarios, where an increase in interest rates, and a run from the dollar...Will force the US government to spend over 80% of the tax revenue, JUST TO SERVICE the debt interest....
I am not an economist but my worry is that government deficit spending was the largest driving factor for the bull run. Balance the budget and the economy crashes.
The thing with justice is that when you look past it in one place, you don’t really get to ask for it in another. I’m talking about Gaza - it set the precedent that the U.S. and its client state, Israel, can get away with anything. Nothing is out of bounds, criminality is normalized, and accountability is dependent on the identity of the victim. Now that the victims are people affected by the stock market manipulation (people in the West), suddenly we’re interested in justice.
There's no mystery here. His son Oil Barron Trump has been doing the same thing, along with Trump, in the crypto markets and online prediction markets for years now. They've made over a billion easy.
Some highlights include a $580 million dollar bet on oil futures 15 minutes before Trump made the announcement of talks with Iran, which the Iranian government denied actually happened.
Naturally, political appointments at the SEC are preventing investigation.
I mentioned this in another topic by Trump mentioned the pause before the TruthSocial post in an interview on FoxNews. I can't remember who it was with but I think her name started with an "M". If I can find a link and timestamp i'll come back and edit this post.
Just so everyone is aware, Trump mentioned the deal in an interview before his post on TruthSocial. So if you're thinking all the trades that happened just before the TruthSocial post are insider trading maybe the traders where just watching the news.
If i can find a link to the interview i'll come back and edit this post with a link and where it fits in the wsj timeline.
> A [whitehouse] spokesman told the Financial Times that it did not "tolerate any administration official illegally profiteering off of insider knowledge".
So the Trump administration is passing on information for others to profit from in exchange for something else. Totally legal. Right?
This administration has taken grift and corruption to a level only seen in banana republics. I seriously don't know how you come back from this. GOP voters seem to be openly cheering it.
It’s almost like turning the president into a monarch by baselessly granting total immunity was a bad idea, foreseeably so.
This is the new normal.
I want people to really think about what’s going on here. $1-2 billion of taxpayer money is being spent every day to literally kill people for stock and futures trades.
And nobody will be punished for this. Anyone who gets a whiff of legal trouble will just buy a person.
At some point this is going to destroy even the appearance of market integrity.
All the whataboutism in the replies here is amusing, because for once people are actually right, and the OP is also right. People got exactly what they voted for. For many decades now they voted and voted and perpetuated the same system of two parties, each one terrible in its own ways (though arguably one is really quite a bit worse than the other. All that is literally what people voted for.
Its pretty safe to say that Biden didn't go start a disastrous war because Netanyahu said a nice thing about him. It also seems unlikely that Harris would have started such a war with her 2-state stance.
There's such a thing as degrees of influence. A fool who is strictly against anything Israel suggests is just as manipulable as a narcissistic moron.
I am bothered by the fact that many people have just resigned themselves to this state of affairs. Rather they're leaning in to this behavior themselves in small doses, incrementally, believing that having integrity is for suckers.
I understand the sarcasm. One thing I liked was the NYT's recent interview with (former General) McChrystal, who suggested making some form of service mandatory, not necessarily military but teaching, charity, and public works.
I don't believe these issues can be solved at the macro level. The US has many crumbling institutions and they are still ripe for the taking. Participate in volunteer events, the local FD, join the local Masons, or similar.
Engage with people directly, locally, even or especially with people who you assume hate you (they probably don't).
Insider trading is prevalent on both sides. But the brazen daily market manipulation done by this administration is different. If you dont see that you are willingly blind
It’s not different because of who’s doing it but due to scale: creating news which steers markets is worse than trading based on insider information, and there’s a scale question as well (billions versus millions). I want them both prosecuted but in terms of priorities I’d favor the police going after armed robbers over porch thieves.
I think this sort of thinking is why we have people who continue to vote against their own self interests. The fact is we really don't have enough information to make meaningful conclusions about which party is causing more harm with insider trading. It would take a team of accountants and lawyers years to confidently measure this. A random individual isn't going to assess this well.
But because people confidently draw often incorrect or baseless conclusions based on vibes and what largely democrat controlled corporate news media tells them, they're going to fall into us versus them mentality at party lines instead of better understanding that both sides are screwing us over tremendously and not accepting a perceived lesser evil
> what largely democrat controlled corporate news media tells them
If you believe this, ask why and which side benefits from you being so misinformed. There’s a reason why the right-wing spends billions of dollars and encouraging people to blame “both sides” is a key part of it.
I am not a fan of the democrats - I think they are corrupt and have in many cases given up on being democratic, totally beholden to their donors.
That said, Trump is unbelievably obviously corrupt and doing immense, immediate, and obvious damage to the country in pursuit of personal enrichment. If you dont see this you are willingly blind.
Since you've drawn the comparison, it's worth pointing out that a notable difference is that Nancy Pelosi was not (nor was running to be) POTUS and could not have unilaterally gotten the US into a war in the middle east.
Amusingly enough, she was Speaker of the House, which means at one point she had more legitimate power to enact war than Trump ever has. The Congress must first vote to declare war, and only then can the President sign and execute it. Legitimately.
There's no "proven evidence" (whatever that means) that people in the Trump administration are insider trading either, yet we can see some very suspicious ripples in the market.
Pelosi was even more obvious as we know all of her trades, their timing and her outrageous outperformance during that period.
Trump is out here running crypto rug pull grifts as the president to enrich himself and his family while holding office. This hand wringing about Nancy Pelosi is just slopulism. She just invested in SF tech companies and they happened to do well.
Corruption is worsening and never attenuates on its own. We need a third party devoted to indiscriminately tackling the problem. Problem is, the people who pick and choose which politicians win will never allow it, because they are significant benefactors and fostered this duopoly to begin with.
The "this isn't new it's always been happening" talk is disingenuous and incorrect. Yes, there has been some evidence of insider trading over the previous years. However, the scope and frequency of evidence pointing to insider trading since the Trump administration took power is orders of magnitude larger than was happening previously.
The 2020 insider trading scandal dealt with amounts in the hundreds of thousands and low millions. The sudden trading happening right before Trump makes announcements that majorly affect the stock market is in the hundreds of millions.
Or just legalize it across the board recognizing that when only the powerful can make use of it. and we're not going to do anything about the powerful, we might as well let everyone else in on the game.
That is truly my cynical mindset at this point. The degree to which my trading is regulated is beyond absurd in a market and society where things like this are allowed to happen.
Reminds me of a debate in college. I was in college during the baseball doping days in early/mid 2000s and gave a debate presentation that the only way to make it a fair sport is to allow it for everyone; basically there should be no rules. The class vehemently disagreed but purely on emotion, no solid defenses were made that I couldn’t counter with a simple logic rebuttal. In any case, I tend to agree with you. The laws are only on the books to make naive people feel like there money is being looked after and the asset values aren’t manipulated. Remove the laws and the layman is a skeptic by default as he should be.
They would be smart enough to know/assume it’s a rigged game they are playing and stay away from it. The veil of laws and regulations is a lie when they’re not enforced
The biggest issue here is not insider trading itself, but the fact that (foreign) policy is being used for insider trading.
Think of the tariff madness of last year. The biggest issue wasn't that insider billionaires were robbing outsider billionaires. The bigger issue was the massive stress small businesses had to endure, who didn't know how they were going to survive.
I am of the mind that legalization of this practice would decrease trust in the marketplace to an extent that I think is necessary at this point. Of course, the better alternative would be to actually enforce these laws and increase confidence in the marketplace but how will the inside track billionaires make their money if we do?
Not what I'm saying, but this has happened _so many times_ and nothing has come of talking about it so far. I would love to see things change, but in this specific instance I'm not holding my breath
That isn't very nice. OP never suggested we shouldn't talk about this topic, only that we all know this has been happening for a century.
Legislation has been introduced to address this exact problem. Edit: Polymarkets should be hevialy regulated or made illegal. In fact, they were illegal, until someone found a loophole.
Stop Insider Trading Act (House): Introduced by Rep. Bryan Steil, this bill aims to prohibit purchasing publicly traded stocks, requires 7-day notice for sales, and imposes penalties for violations. It is supported by GOP leadership.
Restore Trust in Congress Act (Senate): Introduced by Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Ashley Moody, this bill bans trading/ownership of individual stocks and requires divestment within 180 days of enactment.
When the foxes are running the hen houses, this is what you expect.
Worse is there has emerged a dominant ideology and ruling party which enshrines this as morality and the law of the land. Rule of the strong, and the weak must submit.
(To be clear, the foxes have always been running the hen house, they just usually at least tried to be discrete about it. Now they don't care.)
Have you tried just becoming strong and connected? Try harder. (/s)
The US ended most of their subsidies to Ukraine last year. Historically the defense-industrial complex is eager to stir something else up as soon as one money source gets cut off.
After Afghanistan it went to Ukraine, and after Ukraine it has to be something else. This is the unstoppable flow of the defense industry moving to a new outlet.
2. Let’s hypothesize the US gov’t or allies did pre-release this info to traders as a policy tool, inviting them to sell oil profitably, shaping the later price action . In a practical sense they may have brought more speculators to the short side than otherwise would have been there; is that scenario really beyond the pale?
3. News of war and sovereign relations on an international stage necessarily will test the boundaries of traditional law of confidentiality and fair practices.
You will see, that anything else other than a ground invasion, is guaranteed to give Iran a war victory.
Trump war goal are to destroy Iranian nuclear capabilities, and to change the Iranian government.
If he succeed, victory. Otherwise, defeat.
Victory I guess.
The war should not be won. it should be ended before everyone loses.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Iran is far more capable militarily than Iraq and Afghanistan and, particulary, their military may be world's the leading experts on assymetric warfare; they train everyone else - Hezbollah, the Houthis, etc. Their proxies held off the US military and allies in Iraq, a neighboring country, where Iran had far less motivation than to defend their own homes from a US invasion.
The US could win given unlimited political will and time, but it would be very costly and anyway, the US couldn't sustain that will for much easier situations in the prior two wars. Nobody is crazy enough to launch a ground invasion of Iran, I hope.
All the other wars depended on installing a friendly and competent government that would take over. That is a very hard thing to do. It’s too easy to support a friendly government that’s also corrupt and incompetent.
In Iran it will be the same problem after military victory. The US doesn’t want to run the show so what’s next? Nobody knows and it will take years to see where this is going. I hope they don’t destroy too much infrastructure there so people can rebuild quickly and society goes back to some normal.
I sincerely hope too but the man is lunatic.
My analysis and my comment I linked to agrees. And that is a strategic victory for Iran, Russia, China and a defeat for Israel, and the US. The worst will be the Gulf States hostages of their dueling stock pile of defense missiles running out...to which they will have to queue for, with US DOD at the front of the queue.
False, Israel has used the whole war to take over Lebanon almost silently from mass media attention. They are about to annex a part of it.
i wonder why you think mass media attention would matter.
It would remind me of that if Ukraine attacked first... over and over again throughout the last decades... together with it's allies in the region... occasionally abducting a few hundred Russia civilians... there is no parallel here.
There is this one weird trick for lasting piece with Israel: stop being hostile.
No one ever really wins in war, except those not participating.
The US is an oil exporting country and the people pulling the puppet strings of the dominant party in power directly benefit from high oil prices.
Further, oligarchical political-economic structures also benefit from "chaos is a ladder" scenarios where their privileged knowledge and access to decision makers gives them the ability to benefit from every new conflagration. The insider trading examples are only the trip of the iceberg.
The "war" will wind down after they've made their profits and redistributed the wealth and control as they set out to do.
Gone are the days where ruling elites benefited from international commercial stability. Those with power right now want chaos, and they will continue to create it until they are held to account.
Note that all of above applies just as well to the rulers of Iran as it does to the United States. It is the people who suffer, not the elites.
If you step back, in 1979 Iran launched a revolution that had an avowed goal of “death to America”. If the Iranians play the kinetic scenario to the bitter end, they simply are demonstrating this was not mere poetry and there never was any other off-ramp, just tactically deciding at what relative strength these two systems will collide.
So Iran loses by demonstrating irrational resolve in antisocial tactics, like firing missiles randomly at neutral neighbors, which is the same precondition you take as gating victory. Conflicts are played out in the real world specifically to resolve inconsistent modeling like this held by different sides, and all parties would be well served by finding a better way to resolve the conflicting modeling here, because the most likely scenario currently is that everyone loses.
Step back further and you see that they were overthrowing a dictator that the US had installed over their democratically elected government.
- the enemy was intermingled with the "friendly" civilians, and they couldn't be told apart, leading to everyone being treated brutally and potential friends becoming enemies
- the enemy was prepared to fight to the death, for years if need be, and knew they could outlast US public opinion
- the enemy knew they could prevail because of centuries of history defeating much larger opponents (in Vietnam's case, of them previously defeating France and China).
All of these same conditions would be present in a ground war in Iran, with some religious fanaticism thrown in on top.
- the enemy had plenty of material, technical and financial support from adversarial superpowers who were all too happy to see American lives, money and military resources wasted.
That external support is not fully scaled up yet (despite clear reports of Russian intelligence support for Iran), but you can bet it would be in the event of a major ground assault, occupation, and/or counter-insurgency quagmire.
Vietcong weren't exactly fighting with 'plenty of material'. They used weapons from second world war, sometimes first world war, cheap Chinese crap..
Are you comparing that to Americans aircraft, bombs, helicopters ? It was as asymmetrical as it would be against Iran.
31 million people just woke up and decided to hate America? Or.. was there a little more to that story?
These Iranians are so evil they want to kill even love:
https://fa-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D9%85%D8%B1%DA...
That's, what, 2,000 years before the settlement of Jamestown by Europeans.
If only Muad'dib were here. He could find a way through.
i imagine both sides are actually in the same game.
why do u think trump allow iran to sell oil still -_-. there was a lovely post earlier today on HN laying it all out pretty eloquently.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47499822
i personally think the people who do _business_ on both sides will find their way to profit out of this. as they always do.
if u look at the timing of statements u can see its just a game.
- Pakistan has a defense treaty with Saudi Arabia.
- Saudi Arabia has been attacked.
- Witkoff claims to negotiate with Iranians in Pakistan and Iran denies it. Witkoff has a horrible track record in that either the negotiations fail or are a precursor to attacks.
- What better way to spend time in Pakistan than to recruit a proxy and promise US money to the cash-strapped government?
https://x.com/gothburz/status/2036413487530831899
I wouldn’t be surprised if they “let” it happen by optimizing for double clickthrough engagement produced by the inevitable “grok is this true?” at the top of every thread.
The worst part is that the only way to develop immunity to, and pattern recognition for, these parody accounts is to subject yourself to them repeatedly. So the people who can recognize the fake tweets the quickest are also the people who read them the most. And there are plenty who never develop the pattern recognition…
It’s definitely some form of social infection.
[1] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ut4C64FKfqc
The thing is - insider trading is illegal but it's poorly defined.
Martha Stewart wasn't convicted of insider trading - she was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to a federal investigator.
Mark Cuban wasn't convicted of insider trading either. He wasn't convicted at all. He kept his mouth shut and the jury found him not guilty of insider trading.
Her blunder was thinking she was too special (or too rich?... she wasn't really that rich) to have to deal with the laws, so she tried to scheme her way around the punishment.
As I recall, her insider trade only made or saved her something like $64k. That's laughably small, and the final punishment to her would have been little more than a slap on the wrist had she not blown it up by lying and cheating to avoid the original punishment.
It's not some innocent mom who accidentally listened to some advice, she really should have known better.
TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out
It can blow up a few high ROI targets, but that ROI isn't from the cost of rebuilding - it's from the opportunity cost of not having them.
Wait. I've heard this story before. Let's ask any of the recently "liberated" countries how that worked out for them...
And the US will clearly have failed to protect allies and project force in the Gulf. If the bulk of OPEC moves to a basket currency trade to ally more with PRC, India, and Russia that will be an astonishing failure.
I wouldn't have thought even Trump and this Republican administration was incompetent enough to break the petrodollar, but here we are, just one year in.
Also, don't look at fracking production curves. Bakken and Eagle Ford are foreshadowing the Permian.
In terms of how this impacts prices, the headline number is usually Brent crude, but there are a number of different "flavors" with various geopolitical factors that influence price[1]. For example, the US market is going to respond differently then the Indian market. The former is a net exporter halfway across the globe from the conflict area, the later gets a substantial portion of their oil through the Strait of Hormuz.
If the conflict carries on for a while things will probably normalize across markets as production and shipping adjust to the new reality. But in the short term you are going to have some folks mildly inconvenienced by slightly higher prices, while other folks might not even be able to fill their tanks.
[]1 https://oilprice.com/oil-price-charts/
Who cares what the real price is, right? - especially when you've never pumped you own gas into your car, and you are so out of touch with normal life that you think life insurance costs $15 or $20 (I believe those were the numbers he threw out a few years ago on an interview.)
Don't elect a geriatric compromise candidate. The current administration's excesses create a massive opportunity for a pendulum swing. It's really not that hard. Hold yourself, your neighbors, your family and your friends accountable for who they vote for. And as tempting as it is, don't give into cynicism. It will take work but change for the better is always possible, and really in America, is far less out of reach than it would often seem.
You're also up against a large population which has been brainwashed, and even if someone deprogrammed is still not intellectually capable of reasoning beyond their own immediate interests. In other words, a democracy where ignorant people can vote is ultimately doomed to look quite like what we have now.
Impossible. Democratic Party power is concentrated into a gerontocracy mostly interested in preserving their own wealth/power. Appeasement and encouragement of status quo will be the result of any Democrat victory.
Of course all this Trump shit is good precedent for them to use similar tactics to line their pockets next time.
It's not like you see better behaviour from 41 year old Zuckerberg or other younger founders.
At least with old people, you eventually have a slim chance to be one of the old bastards in charge.
People with strong political beliefs are going to turn their head to keep their side in power rather than put someone in power that will push policies they are fundamentally against.
Blagojevich was not replaced by a Republican.
At this point presidential elections are won by getting members of the other side to stay home. So encourage young people to get out and vote if you want a Democrat. Don’t waste your breath telling someone who cares about gun rights to vote for a Democrat.
Your comment reads like you are arguing with yourself. I never suggested anything to the contrary of much of what you write, so frankly I have no idea what point you are trying to make. I suggest you re-read my comment in full as I think we are predominantly in agreement.
"this is an interpretion"
> this is a quote
Hopefully this clears things up.
Does everyone still believe this will be possible/happen/allowed by the current regime?
Why don't you work on lobbying your grandparents and their vote because I seriously doubt you are equipped for whatever armed conflict you are imagining. Have some dignity. If Americans are so called upon to defend the constitution then so be it, there is no need to prematurely soil your pants about it.
> Does everyone still believe this will be possible/happen/allowed by the current regime?
Note the previous riot was unsuccessful. And probably he'll try something similar this time so the relevant services know what to expect.
Vance however, I dont see much of that in action. But time will tell. Folks like to think it is a quiet conspiracy but every time you get a glimpse inside workings of government, if feels like they hate each other more than the next guy, regardless of who is in power.
There was an AskHistorians post about the French revolution a few years ago that really stuck with me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w18qt5/what_...
> Stability had hardly been a hallmark of the Revolution til that point, and really what we have seen is a revolving door of men rising to the summit of power, only to realize that once your head is above the rest it's a prime target for the guillotine. Of the early years of the Revolution, virtually any man who had been considered a leader was either dead or in exile. The King was executed in January of 1793. The Girondin, formerly indistinguishable from the 'left,' went en masse to the guillotine in October 1793. Danton & friends (dubbed by Robespierre 'the indulgents'), the literal authors of the Insurrection of August 10th which overthrew the King and declared the Republic, the 'giant of the Revolution,' had been executed in April 1794. Interspersed with these prominent deaths were hundreds of individuals who had been important players in the Revolution, whether in national or local politics, and who had now paid the price for their notoriety
In times of crisis and scarcity, the usual outcome is that anyone whose ego is big enough to think that he can lead or profit finds that they become a target for elimination. The folks who survive are the ones who focus on, well, surviving. We're headed for one of those times of crisis now, though most people don't want to admit it, and a lot of the people who are profiting off ill-gotten gains now may find that they don't live to enjoy it simply because it gives them a taste for profiteering that eventually makes them take stupid risks.
They believe, rightly or not that they can withdraw from the world with their wealth more or less in one piece to some kind of safe zone.
Seems like it'd be pretty easy to diversify into inflation-protected assets after taking big profits.
But I also don't see the dollar collapsing any time soon. The dollar's strength is built on the US economy, and the US economy is still one of the strongest in the world, with high productivity per person. We'll see some inflation, sure, but nothing that the rich insider traders can't hedge against.
I do not expect that there will be any real justice here. They're not gutting the average American -- they're bleeding us, extracting a small enough amount of value that they can get away with it. And we don't live in a just world.
Even if the central bank might does a bad job and make a mess of the economy, the activity of 350 million people is hard to ignore.
Is it enough to _fully_ sustain the US dollar?
Who knows, but at least there is a floor, even if everybody stopped using US dollars for international trade.
I think this is a big part of both the impact of globalization and the U.S's waning power. Back around 1950, right after WW2, the "first world" (the developed west, not including Russia or Warsaw Pact countries) had a total population of just over 500M, and the U.S. was 150M of those, just under 1/3. And the remainder were largely dependent upon U.S. capital, machinery, and technology, having just bombed each other back to pre-industrial times.
Today, the developed world is about 3-4B people, and the U.S. is 350M of them, less than 10%. China alone has lifted about 500M people out of poverty and into the middle class in the last 2 decades, a population larger than the total population of the middle class in the U.S. The population of Asia is around 4.86B, 15x the size of the United States, and an increasingly large number of them are living a lifestyle close to what Americans enjoy.
Nobody thinks of the Indian rupee this way today.
Because Petrodollars make our global economy work, and Iran wants their partner China to be in control! If Americans lose sight of their need to maintain their role as *THE* lingua franca of international trade, then all hell is lost. The US cannot afford its military without massive consequences if it can't raise extraordinarily cheap debt through purchases of oil in US dollars immediately turned around to buy US debt to maintain that money's value.
Assets are yours only as long as there's a government to enforce your ownership rights over those assets for you. In case of government or societal collapse, your physical assets then are free for the taking to the ones with the most men with the most guns, and your paper assets are worthless.
sorry but this is such a coping mechanism, or doomsday talking. Neither is dollar collapsing nor US government is collapsing, as there has been no evidence whatsoever of any of that even moving towards happening, at least on any meaningfully predictable timescale (i.e. 3-5 years? while even that's rich for predictions). Anything past that is just broken clock being correct.. at some point in time.
What would it take for dollar to "collapse"? What are the exact mechanisms that would be required to start that process?
What is the evidence of US government being "toppled" with layers and layers and layers of diverse (financial, legal, military, political, social, you name it) protections in place? It's the kind of thing preppers like to dream of but it's not happpening in our lifetimes.
When things of that scale happen you see it YEARS in advance in true poverty (as in people starving), in anger (as in people getting increasingly violent) at scale, in mass mobilization of masses actually looking to topple the government. Nobody is working right now to overthrow US government, there were never any organized attempts at that, not even demonstrations of a vector that can once lead there, as in it's simply not happening (sorry you can't in all seriousness put Jan 6 there as that was shocking for US political PR, but shockingly irrelevant for any country that has gone through real upheaval). US is extraordinarily rich even in it's poor version, everyone has everything to lose and nothing meaningful to gain from any "revolution".
I mean.
Do you read the news?
these protections are not working very well these days. the administration is getting away with _so much_ criminality in plain view.
I believe the Constitution and related artefacts should be stored in the British Museum with other historical documents. Civic religion needs to be done away with.
The first post-revolution organizational system of the US, described in the Articles of Confederation, is very different than the difficult and contingent pivot to a federal system. Almost a million US citizens died in the transition.
Whether the majority of people believe that or not has more to do with the place of the Revolution in our national mythology than with what actually happened in reality.
~30 years later all the quick investors of the privatization run the country and have been sending all their able bodied men into a drone-based meat grinder with no end in sight.
No wait
No, it is mostly just the one party.
And what does that new framework look like to you?
1. Massively increase the size of congress. Modern technology makes this feasible in a way that it wasn't when the size was capped. More congress critters means it's harder to buy off a majority of them.
2. Re-write the first amendment to significantly limit political speech. The specifics of this are obviously very thorny, but reversing Citizens United and drastically limiting the amount of money that is spent on elections is necessary to have _any_ chance of saving the country.
Passionately agree with this!
2 is dicey and I would like to try campaign finance reform first.
I don't want to throw everything out because that's how you get slavery and The Handmaid's Tale. At the same time, I'll gladly acknowledge that a lot of our institutions were rotten from the founding and to their core, and their dismantling maybe not necessary but certainly suitable for a reborn America that leaves much of its baggage behind.
Hacks were found in the US that distribute free money, and that was communicated to millions of people.
People showed up for said free money.
If it’s the hedge funds or institutional money, you can absolutely be sure this will come to a head. People don’t like being taken for a ride, and if they are repeatedly taken for a ride and they are organized market participants they will come around and make sure there is a comeuppance as a collective
Record and wait. Justice is slow but has the power of the nation state. Once the leadership of this current government is gone and nobody is around to protect the offenders then its time to swoop in with the records and the justice system.
This is why its risky to join corrupt political movements led by old men, because they will use you to break the law, then die and you'll be on the hook. Much like the people who worked for the Soviets in the Baltics post war as young staffers, who administered the forced deportations and were eventually prosecuted ~50 years later for genocide or crimes against humanity.
i.e. everyone working for ICE today should be agitating for a pardon, given how racial profiling and warrentless raids are probably rather illegal in the long run.
this is pretty much how things will unfold in USA. Everything that has to happen will happen but very slowly. There is all the evidence supporting that.
Elect people who will make justice a priority.
I don't think that this is a particular form of exceptionalism, beyond the US having a longer tradition of widespread, retail-owned shares, and law-making around that fact.
But sometimes I wonder when people are criticising the US as a culture, they're often choosing as the baseline that should be respected standards that were also defined in a US cultural context. What this sometimes means is that in internal US culture these points are seen as something that is heavily discussed, because there was a point where it was democratically decided and therefore could be undecided in the same way, like corporate personhood, or money-as-speech. In the case of the criminalization "insider trading", there is lively debate about whether this is actually a "good thing". That can sound horrific externally, because of course insider trading is a bad thing. But someone decided to make that a bad thing, and -- for historical accident reasons -- the edges of that debate was largely defined within the US.
(This is mostly just barely-informed speculation: sometimes issues like this emerge in international fora, or start in another culture and quickly spread. But the cultural and financial dominance of the US in the last century or so really makes these things often a point of debate in American terms, and a fixed point elsewhere. I speak here as an immigrant to the US and also someone who is dipped in global policy work, rather than someone who is stating this as a good or a bad thing.)
There will never be an investigation while Trump is president, but, it's entirely feasible to force some action in the time being to enable a case later.
FYI it may not be technically illegal it depends on all sorts of things.
If trade were made public it could be very damaging.
And realistically we don't want that. Similar with Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, better to sit on things until Trump is out of office, so there can be no pardon.
At least the USA is only 4% of the world’s population so the world economy will just find other financial hubs and currencies, no big loss.
Also something to keep in mind in the future: Old people have no reason to fear prison, they will die before they can get convicted.
The odds are too low of anybody getting meaningfully punished while they get to openly setup their entire family for generations using means and information not available to any normal citizen.
And while not guaranteed they are statistically more likely to suffer age related cognitive decline while still in office.
It's nice and clear, has obvious motivation and obvious sourcing.
Also obvious incentives: e.g. after your political career you will live with the system you helped build.
That said, it's hard to reconcile that with the fact that Democrats continue to be the opposition party, and failed to even imprison Trump over four years for the things he'd done. And even in the best case scenario, we wouldn't expect Trump himself to live long enough to face much justice.
The optimism left in me hopes that this era can serve as an enduring cautionary tale for future societies.
For 90% of her tenure, her investments produced lower returns than an S&P500 ETF. The other 10% were all driven by NVDIA.
If she's the bar for one of the best stock traders ever, I must be a Buffet-level genius.
---
Why do people keep repeating this lie?
I'd like to point out it was NOT the Democrats who failed us, it was Republicans in congress who failed us. I'm really not sure how you can suggest Democrats failed us, when they had 2 successful impeachments against trump, but it was Senate Republicans that voted to not remove him when 60 votes were required in a Senate split 50/50. Every single Republican Senator except Mitt Romney in the first impeachment failed us. The second impeachment for insurrection got closer at 57 votes in the senate, but Republicans failed us again.
Democrats absolutely did not fail us, they were the ones trying to hold a criminal accountable. It was and always is Republicans who fail us.
And then to compensate they should be paid more in terms of salary, even if that salary seems absurdly large it would be less than most of them gain from the insider info they use to make deals.
Take the median income, multiply it by 5-10 and thats their salary.
"Speaking fees" and deferred income are very different from being able to bank the profits tomorrow morning.
Americans have been a democracy for 200 years and have no healthcare, no public transit, a crippling drug and homeless problem, a crippling gun violence problem... The list goes on. Democracy doesn't seem to be having the desired affect there.
Why should that suddenly change? Where's this hope coming from?
Unfortunately with 90% of broadcast television soon to be owned by a single family, overturning this corrupt power may be even more difficult.
I think it’s time for society as a whole to reconsider the social contract legitimizing the wealth of these oligarchs.
I love how people pretend this established some new kind of precedent.
Y'all keep forgetting Nixon.
"Now, Therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974."
I hope they have enough direct flights to not have a layover in an unfriendly state.
Without being able to compare future liabilities to future income, we're lacking critical context. It's like they wrote half an article; kinda frustrating.
What is in discussion, are the multiple, very feasible, and very realistic scenarios, where an increase in interest rates, and a run from the dollar...Will force the US government to spend over 80% of the tax revenue, JUST TO SERVICE the debt interest....
https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1773582592057062.jpg
Close out enough debt to make what's left serviceable. Thank our richest for their sacrifice for the nation's greater good.
The alternative is that they take the money and run. Or start WWIII. There is no in-between.
https://charliesykes.substack.com/p/a-vivid-snapshot-of-trum...
Some highlights include a $580 million dollar bet on oil futures 15 minutes before Trump made the announcement of talks with Iran, which the Iranian government denied actually happened.
Naturally, political appointments at the SEC are preventing investigation.
FOX Business' Maria Bartiromo spoke with Trump shortly after the post, and Trump stressed, "Iran wants to make a deal badly."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-orders-war-dept-postp...
If i can find a link to the interview i'll come back and edit this post with a link and where it fits in the wsj timeline.
So the Trump administration is passing on information for others to profit from in exchange for something else. Totally legal. Right?
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-secs-ex-enforcem...
this war will most certainly still be going on by the end of 2026
and at that point will have cost half a trillion dollars
US oil producers are THRILLED at these prices (as well as Russia)
he can't just end the war, not only his call anymore
if US leaves the strait no oil will ever get through
and there are 150 tankers currently waiting, maybe forever
This is the new normal.
I want people to really think about what’s going on here. $1-2 billion of taxpayer money is being spent every day to literally kill people for stock and futures trades.
And nobody will be punished for this. Anyone who gets a whiff of legal trouble will just buy a person.
At some point this is going to destroy even the appearance of market integrity.
p.s. @dang doesn't work - I only saw this randomly. For reliable (if sometimes delayed!) message delivery use hn@ycombinator.com.
There's such a thing as degrees of influence. A fool who is strictly against anything Israel suggests is just as manipulable as a narcissistic moron.
America is desperately missing an "Insider trading driven government is bad actually" party
I don't believe these issues can be solved at the macro level. The US has many crumbling institutions and they are still ripe for the taking. Participate in volunteer events, the local FD, join the local Masons, or similar.
Engage with people directly, locally, even or especially with people who you assume hate you (they probably don't).
Insider trading is prevalent on both sides. But the brazen daily market manipulation done by this administration is different. If you dont see that you are willingly blind
Why is it good when Democrats insider trade but bad when Republicans take the exact same trades?
But because people confidently draw often incorrect or baseless conclusions based on vibes and what largely democrat controlled corporate news media tells them, they're going to fall into us versus them mentality at party lines instead of better understanding that both sides are screwing us over tremendously and not accepting a perceived lesser evil
If you believe this, ask why and which side benefits from you being so misinformed. There’s a reason why the right-wing spends billions of dollars and encouraging people to blame “both sides” is a key part of it.
That said, Trump is unbelievably obviously corrupt and doing immense, immediate, and obvious damage to the country in pursuit of personal enrichment. If you dont see this you are willingly blind.
The people have lost faith in both parties, we now expect our leaders to be cronies.
Pelosi was even more obvious as we know all of her trades, their timing and her outrageous outperformance during that period.
The 2020 insider trading scandal dealt with amounts in the hundreds of thousands and low millions. The sudden trading happening right before Trump makes announcements that majorly affect the stock market is in the hundreds of millions.
This isn't business as usual.
That is truly my cynical mindset at this point. The degree to which my trading is regulated is beyond absurd in a market and society where things like this are allowed to happen.
Think of the tariff madness of last year. The biggest issue wasn't that insider billionaires were robbing outsider billionaires. The bigger issue was the massive stress small businesses had to endure, who didn't know how they were going to survive.
Legislation has been introduced to address this exact problem. Edit: Polymarkets should be hevialy regulated or made illegal. In fact, they were illegal, until someone found a loophole.
Stop Insider Trading Act (House): Introduced by Rep. Bryan Steil, this bill aims to prohibit purchasing publicly traded stocks, requires 7-day notice for sales, and imposes penalties for violations. It is supported by GOP leadership.
Restore Trust in Congress Act (Senate): Introduced by Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Ashley Moody, this bill bans trading/ownership of individual stocks and requires divestment within 180 days of enactment.
Worse is there has emerged a dominant ideology and ruling party which enshrines this as morality and the law of the land. Rule of the strong, and the weak must submit.
(To be clear, the foxes have always been running the hen house, they just usually at least tried to be discrete about it. Now they don't care.)
Have you tried just becoming strong and connected? Try harder. (/s)
After Afghanistan it went to Ukraine, and after Ukraine it has to be something else. This is the unstoppable flow of the defense industry moving to a new outlet.
We gave Ukraine a lot of old stuff from our stockpiles and bought new stuff for ourselves.
It's generally not called a "subsidy". It's called "foreign aid".