UnderpantsWeevil @ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

If I want to modify this wheel to suit my needs

Steepled fingers

Evil laughing

Another victim!!!

nobody outside USA liked Bush.

Blair defends Iraq war and praises Bush

Sept. 7, 2010

You can find similar pledges of support and friendship from Shinzo Abe, Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon, Steven Harper, John Howard, Nicolas Sarkozy, Vladimir Putiny.. Practically every conservative government leader of the War on Terror era was expressing support for Bush late into his second term and beyond.

Europe and China are in very steep competition also on cars.

The Shift of German Car Parts Manufacturing to China Explained

Oops. It's all China.

IDK if you are American, things may look different over there

It's not, that's the joke. The American business model of buying from the cheapest producer and then spending all your money on branding/marketing is everywhere.

Both Volkswagen and Ford parts are coming from the same plants. Possibly made by the same exact machinists. The only thing you're paying a premium for is the ad reads.

Trump selected Powell back in 2018.

Nobody was positive about Bush

• Yes, George W. Bush kept us safe
• Thank You, President Bush: Reflections on the War on Terror, Defense of the Family, and Revival of the Economy
• “For all of my disagreements with President Bush, I will forever be grateful to him for guaranteeing we got the money we needed to rebuild New York,” Clinton says in Hillary.

Incidentally, the 9/11 Responder and Survivor Health Funding Correction Act did not pass until 2023.

We are flush with Bush hagiographies.

Maybe the simpler point I could have made is that everybody competes with China.

They're the single largest manufacturing economy in the world. And they're on the cutting edge of a host of modern technical fields.

Vanishingly few economies compete with China in any material way (Japan, India, Korea, maybe France and Brazil if we're being generous). They're a global wholesaler for everyone else.

But you can always push stuff faster than the speed of sound

Sure, but said stuff can push back at you in turn, on account of Newton's 2nd Law. At some point, you reach an equilibrium between the force applied to the material and the reflected force due to resistance.

Might help to look up the definition of Terminal Velocity.

Terminal velocity is the maximum speed an object can reach while falling through a fluid (like air or water). It occurs when the force of gravity pulling the object down is balanced by the fluid's resistance, or drag, pushing it up.

As the speed of an object increases, so does the drag force acting on it, which also depends on the substance it is passing through (for example air or water). At some speed, the drag or force of resistance will be equal to the gravitational pull on the object. At this point the object stops accelerating and continues falling at a constant speed called the terminal velocity (also called settling velocity).

Still Germany favors China, so that speaks against your idea.

This is a race to the bottom. Germans blame the US for a host of domestic problems - high cost of energy, repeated large influxes of migrants (particularly from the Middle East), the repeated threat of high tariffs with a big trading partner, escalation with Russia over Ukraine which has cut Germany off from a number of major markets for cheap raw materials - that have eclipsed their nativist disgust for East Asian businesses.

It's for the same reason Canadians hate the US, atm. Could change on a dime if the AfD takes over the German Parliament and Euro-centric white nationalism becomes an axis around which Russia, Germany, and the US can align.

I think what pisses people off is that USA is clearly abandoning their allies, friends and core values about international law

There's a lot of rhetoric around Trump's fickle ham-handedness. But Germans weren't terribly positive about Biden or Bush, either. The Germans (and the French) are trying to corral the rest of Europe into operating as their client states. That's turf the Americans staked out decades ago, and its one they're struggling to hang onto. So there's a natural tension between German and American capital that doesn't exist in the same way with China, as China's not an occupying military in the region.

Chinese imports are, if anything, easing Germany off the US market system and into an Eastern facing market with German banks and German-owned shipping companies at the center. Chinese and German business people are happy to play ball in the same way that American and Chinese business people worked together to undermine the American working class back in the 80s/90s.

It’s really really sad that USA has fallen so deeply away from decency and respect of human rights

The Americans never had any decency or respect for human rights. What they had was advanced technology and an enormous economic surplus to spread around. Now, the US is in an intellectual and economic retreat, having invested too much of their surplus into a hyper-automated AI pipe dream.

Europe has nothing to gain by wedding itself to an economy that only knows how to make advertisements and bombs (and barely remembers how to crank out the latter). So we're seeing a decoupling that was going to happen under any administration. Trump's just dumping lighter fluid on the dumpster fire.

USD is already down 15% to the Euro as of the start of the year.

I think that's what people seem to miss, here. Not the risk of a stock market crash but of a massive inflationary surge as domestic dollars rapidly outstrip natural resources. We're staring down the barrel of Stagflation.

If Trump gets his way and removes Jerome Powell as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, the market reaction would be swift and brutal, Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos argues.

Okay, lets game this out. The Trump Admin is stacked with private equity bankers, silicon valley hucksters, and individually super-wealthy plutocrats.

The estimated current valuation of the U.S. stock market is $46.2 trillion, according to Siblis Research. This value has tripled over the last 20 years. (In 2003, the total value was $14.2 trillion.) Based on this estimate, the richest 10 percent of U.S. households own roughly $42.7 trillion in stock market wealth, with the richest 1 percent owning $25 trillion. The bottom half of U.S. households own less than half a trillion dollars in stock market wealth.

So, we're left asking the simple question. If the market has an enormous sell-off, who will be doing the selling?

BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street? That's $21T of the $46.2T in equities right there. Which one of these titans blinks? How about Fidelity or JP Morgan Chase? Are they divesting to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars if Jerome Powell is replaced?

And if they are divesting from the market, which equities are they selling?

The Mag7 make up over 50% of the valuation of the current S&P 500. If Jerome Powell is fired, which one of these stocks should I view as overvalued and look to sell off?

Because you can make a fuckton of money if you can answer this question correctly. Place your bets. Place your bets.

That said, I've heard a more compelling argument. The Mag7 is driving the current S&P 500 valuation. And the Mag7 is being propped up by speculative investment in new computer chips. Which means the real lynchpin in the economy is...

NVIDIA

Back in May, Yahoo Finance's Laura Bratton reported that Microsoft (18.9%), Amazon (7.5%), Meta (9.3%), Alphabet (5.6%), and Tesla (0.9%) alone make up 42.4% of NVIDIA's revenue. The breakdown makes things worse. Meta spends 25% — and Microsoft an alarming 47% — of its capital expenditures on NVIDIA chips, and as Bratton notes, Microsoft also spends money renting servers from CoreWeave, which analyst Gil Luria of D.A.Davidson estimates accounted for $8 billion (more than 6%) of NVIDIA's revenue in 2024. Luria also estimates that neocloud companies like CoreWeave and Crusoe — that exist only to prove AI compute services — account for as much as 10% of NVIDIA's revenue.

These companies need lower borrowing costs in order to keep buying more chips. And Powell needs to go in order to lower interest rates, which will facilitate more borrowing and more chip-buying.

It is, in fact, Powell that is a mid-term threat to S&P 500 valuation thanks to his intractable stance on interest rates. And Trump's efforts to remove him are driven by his own cabinet's need to keep inflating the bubble that is the US Tech Sector.

In 1929, the US had a GDP of $104B and a national debt of $16.4B

By 1933, the US had shrank to $57B in valuation, nearly 50% of its 1929 baseline. However, an austerity budget had kept national debt to a meager $23B. While economic scalds warned of a catastrophe, we had saved the country from itself. We had kept our budget tight and our gold reserves in tact. It was the most successful year of the American economy in its entire history.

Then the incoming President, FDR, institutes a sweeping expansionary economic policy which rapidly grew the US debt. From 1933 to 1945, the debt soared to $269B. US GDP was fully eclipsed, at a comparatively meager $229B. The surging rate of GDP was entirely thanks to year after year of domestic debt financing. The consequences would haunt us for generations.

As we all know, 1945 was one of the worst years for the US economy. I would like to think Americans will have learned a lesson from this story. But instead, they continue to spend recklessly at the federal level, bloating our national debt year after year, and driving our economy into the pavement as a result. We currently have a GDP of $27T and a Debt of $35T. Our country is ruined. Our economy is in shambles. We are the poorest nation on Earth. And yet we will not stop.

We need to go back. Herbert Hoover was right, but we wouldn't listen. We need to go back.

Spoken like someone who has never lived on the moon.

You'll notice a lot of the "Likes China" nations are consumer economies and a lot of the "Likes US" nations are export economies (particularly those in direct competition with China).

If I was working at Toyota, I wouldn't like the folks exporting BYDs to all my biggest customers, either.

If my government was transforming into a dictatorship, I would simply stop it.

How dumb can someone be.

Susan Collins has been playing this game for over 20 years. "I voted for X but I didn't think that would mean Y?!" is this endless call and response we get from "moderate" Republican Senators to explain why they supported horrifying reactionary shit.

The real suckers are the voters who keep putting people like this in office. But, more broadly, its the residents who keep selling the best years of their life away in the brutal freezing wilderness so that they can suck the last bit of our natural reserve away to burn up in some rich snob's SUV. The state is full of people who believe the best they can do for themselves is to spend their most productive 40 years self-immolating.

All the people that tried to convince me over the last decade that she was somehow an intelligent principled candidate.

Just like with Ron Paul, the fact that she was outspokenly critical of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (among other fronts) made her such an outlier that people would tilt towards her on reflex. Also like Ron Paul, her deeply reactionary religious beliefs and her profound racism never got the kind of daylight it deserved even among her mainstream media critics.

She was worse than even I implied at the time.

I saw a lot of people lashing out at her as a "Russian Asset" precisely because she was so staunchly anti-war. The fact that she was corrupt (and, largely corrupt in favor of Narendra Modi, whom these hawks continue to adore) was incidental to the fact that she was opposed to the Bush Era Middle East atrocities.

One of the most damning critiques of Gabbard in the modern day is that she was absolutely full of shit with regard to her anti-war stance. Turns out it was entirely circumstantial and fell away rapidly when the belligerents changed. But, again, this never seems to be a point against her with the Bush Era neocons. If you can get Gabbard on board with bombing China or Pakistan or Iran, that's good enough for them.

I think Tulsi Gabbard is quite possibly the least principled politician I’ve ever seen.

It's not really a competition. More of an over/under sort of thing. You either have enough principles to function as a productive member in society or you don't.

Atlanta journalist fights deportation from Ice jail despite dropped charges: ‘I’m seeing what absolute power can do’

Statute of Limitations isn't going to save you from a fascist pogrom.

Moving to TERF Island, no less.

You're off by a factory of 13x

Can you name two or three

Ocasio-Cortez publicly castigated the railway companies and demanded better conditions for workers — then voted to forbid them from striking.

During the 2021 American Rescue Plan COVID relief bill, she advocated in favor of raising the minimum wage as part of the legislation. Ocasio-Cortez was quoted as saying. “If we as a party decide to stand down on our promise of elevating the minimum wage, I think that’s extraordinarily spurious and it’s something that as a party we could have a further conversation about how to fight for it.” With her Squad caucus - and Republican intransigence - they had the ability to hold the bill hostage until minimum wage was included. But she caved and supported the bill anyway.

And she voted for the CHIPS Act without including language to curb climate emissions from data centers, and now we've got a flood of new data centers that are polluting at an unprecedented rate.

(Not this vote, this is horseshit as I’ve explained elsewhere in the comments.)

It was "horseshit" that seemed to win support from Al Green and Ilhan Omar. Perhaps AOC simply had too much beef with MTG to stomach a vote. But it's a bad look to her constituents, regardless.