Can someone explain how this translates for average American citizens? What have been the effects, if any, of consistently trading at a deficit since the 80s?
I've been trying to wrap my head around it, but it seems like there are so many factors at play that the effects aren't obvious.
My intuition is that maintaining trade deficits could cause inflation since US often needs to print money to service its debts. But, that only depends on consistent budget deficits. Inflation also depends on Fed rate somehow...Do consistent deficits increase housing prices? I'm lost..
I hardly know anything about econ. But, my gut feeling is that the effects of 40 years of trade deficits should be clearer than they are. It feels like maybe the status quo has been artificially propped up.
A while back I realized that most news stations have a clear bias and eventually started to dive deeper on stories I was interested in.
I try to look into the source material when possible and found time and time again that the 'news' either left out key details or completely misrepresented the source material.
I never bring up politics, but friends will often repeat news stories and occasionally I'll bring up key facts that weren't reported on.
This has never changed anyone's opinion. Usually all it does is make the other person upset or they bring up another story to reaffirm their currently held belief.
Thankfully my relationships are strong enough that I haven't lost any friends over this, but it's incredibly isolating. Feels like brainwashing on a massive scale.
That's not to say that the news isn't to be trusted at all, some things are as reported. But, often times this isn't the case and it's more important than ever to think critically and not take news stories at face value. The division is mostly manufactured and I believe at our core most of us want the same things.
I feel the same way. The in-depth and nuanced discussions are what drew me to HN in the first place. You can still find it on purely technical posts, but anything remotely political and it feels like Reddit.
I used to come to HN to learn about different viewpoints and find blindspots. But, that is no longer the case here with anything political. The majority of comments on political posts here are skin deep and anything against the grain gets silenced.
I disagree that it looked like a planned confrontation and that all the escalation is on Trump and Vance
Vance made a comment about the US' goal to be diplomatic.
Zelensky speaks up and says he wants to ask Vance something. He then goes on to talk about how Putin annexed Crimea and that between 2014 - 2022 Putin was murdering Ukrainian citizens and ignoring cease fires. He mentioned that nobody did anything to stop Putin, implying that Trump didn't do anything during his first term in office. Then Zelensky ends with something along the lines of "so what do you mean diplomacy" to Vance.
Even if Zelensky's statements were correct, that was not a wise course of action to attempt to call out the President and VP while you're in the Oval office. The meeting erupts from there.
Regardless of how you feel about the current administration, it is a fact that Ukraine has been dependent on the US' aid. I don't know what Zelensky expected to gain from those statements.
What would Ukraine gain from a deal where they give up their natural resources in exchange for a pinky promise between an invading dictator and his 'wanna-be dictator' friend to allow Ukraine to remain an independent country?
What did the USA gain by giving billions of dollars of aid to Ukraine?
My understanding is that the mineral deal is back pay. And if the development is going to be done by American firms, then of course there’s a security alignment for the USA.
The dumb move of the day was on the part of Zelensky thinking he could somehow expand things at the last moment or on live TV.
We destroyed half of Russia’s military without shedding American lives. We defended the principle that people should govern themselves and not be dominated by force.
If other large powers stop being afraid of the US, and if allies can't trust the US, then the US will lose its status and the losses from that are probably a lot more than the billions given to Ukraine.
His point, which he made very clearly, was not criticism of the US; it was distrust that Putin would honor a ceasefire. Zelensky explained that diplomacy is not enough, asking what diplomacy alone will accomplish with someone who doesn't honor their deals.
Vance took it in a really weird direction, first pushing "the kind of diplomacy that is going to save your country", then accusing Zelensky of not saying thank you (despite him having said thank you several times that very meeting?).
The reporters reiterated Zelensky's point, asking what Trump would do if Putin breaks the deal, and Trump just shoots down the possibility, saying he doesn't think it would happen and the possibility isn't worth considering. "What if a bomb drops on your head right now". His only justification being that Trump is president and Putin wouldn't do that to Trump.
Zelensky needs guarantees or the ceasefire isn't worth it to him, so it's fair for him to push back on the lack of guarantees even at the risk of annoying Vance. But they snapped back at him in a very unreasonable way.
I agree that Zelensky's main point was definitely that Putin can't be trusted.
But, he also highlighted a couple of times that that no one did anything to stop Putin which implies that the US didn't do anything. Which could be taken as criticism. Also, ending his statements with "So what do you mean diplomacy" is clearly a snarky response.
The fact is Zelensky has no leverage. He was given aid from the US, apparently as a grant. The US has no obligation to help Ukraine. My understanding is that the aid was given to Ukraine in the hopes that it would weaken Russia. That gamble doesn't appear to be working.
If he didn't like the terms of the deal, it should have been discussed in private, before coming to the US. Instead, he chose to push back in a public forum. So I don't feel the response he got was unwarranted.
An analogy that comes to mind is helping out a friend that just lost their job. You give them money and a place to stay and over time the friend starts to feel entitled to your generosity. Eventually, you get tired of it and give them a deadline to find their own place. Then during dinner with a group of friends, they complain to the table that you only gave them 3 months left to stay instead of 6...
I got carried away with the analogy and of course it doesn't capture the gravity of the situation in Ukraine, but I feel like it captures the core sentiment.
That's not really true. His leverage is that it's also in the interests of the US to maintain norms in which territorial conquest is not rewarded. "Crime doesn't pay". He also attempted to convince the US of this but was brushed off.
Looking at it as a one-off situation in which the US doesn't have any interest results in it not being a one-off situation, because if Ukraine loses then everyone starts itching to take land from their neighbours. And everyone else starts arming themselves with nukes, having seen what Ukraine got for giving them up. That's the path to World War 3. And the US might realize then, with regret, that it was easier to plug the dam when the crack was small.
Trump doesn't understand this. He made it clear that he doesn't see it as an iterated game, just a one-off. Or perhaps he's the one who wants to establish norms of taking over neighbours with force?
As for an analogy, a better example is that your friend's house is being broken into by a notorious gang of criminals threatening the neighborhood, and his children have been picked off one by one, and he's knocking at your door screaming "I'll hold them off if you can pass me some more ammo!", and you're haggling him down for his furniture.
When the USSR invaded Afghanistan, the US was happy to send the Taliban weapons. That wasn't for love or charity. It was American self-interest. So is this.
I suppose its arguable that it wasn't the most diplomatic thing to say in the moment. But I can't fault the guy for pointing out the undiplomatic behavior while his country is being squeezed by Russia and US (wrt mineral rights). How frustrating it must be to hear "have you tried diplomacy?" in the context of an invading force.
Oh wow, makes sense that the video was clipped. The first video I clicked had the entire segment so I guess I got lucky.
I can understand his frustration as well. But, he's a leader at war and lives of his men depend on his actions. The moment is much much bigger than him.
It was an absolutely fair question. Trump and Vance are saying let’s solve it with diplomacy. Zelenskyy provides facts confirming the impossibility of doing diplomacy in good faith. Agreements don’t have any value when history shows the other party not respecting the agreements. So, “what kind of diplomacy you mean?” is a fair question.
Vance’s answer “I mean the kind of diplomacy that would save your country” is a meaningless bullshit sentence.
He's trying to make the point that they can't talk peace without material guarantees of security from their allies as part of the deal, which guarantees are absent from the White House's agreement, because they just had an agreement without such guarantees shit all over by Putin, so it's, you know, kinda pointless to do that again. It's making concessions on paper for no guarantee of peace, with an adversary that's already broken a similar agreement, leading to this very conflict. Why make concessions with no guarantee of security in return, when there's zero reason to believe Russia will keep their word? He actually manages to get most of that explanation out, in between interruptions and non sequitur digs from the other two.
The difference between this and the more confrontational corrections of Trump's bullshit in similar situations recently, by Macron and Trudeau, is stark. Trump and Vance were primed to pounce.
Remember that Z has to answer to the people of Ukraine. People who have been dying in defense of their borders -- and a volunteer army, not conscripts, mind you.
He wanted/needed American aid, but there was no way he could just go in there and kiss the ring, while being slandered as the aggressor and letting Putin off the hook. There's no way that would fly for his people back home -- remember that they are as much of an audience as the Americans.
His best outcome was peace with security guarantees (not on offer from the White House—who knows what might have happened if anyone else had been invited to these patently absurd two-party talks, to maybe sweeten the deal for Ukraine? Christ, how ridiculous).
Failing that, this is a pretty good outcome, in the scheme of things. He outed Trump as a committed Russian ally, not behind closed doors, but on international television so nobody (who matters in this context, I mean world leaders, not Trump voters) can ignore it. He may have just kicked over the final leg holding up the American-centered security apparatus, in such a shocking and spectacular fashion that others will be compelled to form a new one without us, which is something they absolutely need if they're going to keep fighting and the US is withdrawing support. They need other countries not to follow America's lead.
Yeah it might actually get Europe to take matters into their own hands (which Trump would see as a win for the US but which is long term very much a loss for the US). It also might push the EU more towards China. In fact if I were China right now I’d start making overtures to Europe.
> did the us held elections while world war 2 was happening?
> Elections were held on November 7, 1944, during the final stages of World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was easily re-elected to an unprecedented fourth term, and the Democratic Party retained their majorities in both chambers of Congress.
Their course of action was bullshit. "Sure, diplomacy has failed you the last four times, and we've interfered plenty. So why not try it a fifth time?"
They expected Zelensky to be Charlie Brown kicking the football.
We have no fucking right to the "mineral rights" in Ukraine.
2 months ago Jensen Huang did an interview where he said xAi built the fastest cluster with 100k GPUs.he said "what they achieved is singular, never been done before"
https://youtu.be/bUrCR4jQQg8?si=i0MpcIawMVHmHS2e
Meta said they would expand their infrastructure to include 350k GPUs by the end of this year. But, my guess is they meant a collection of AI clusters not a singular large cluster. In the post where they mentioned this, they shared details on 2 clusters with 24k GPUs each.https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/12/data-center-engineerin...
What's singular is putting 100k H100s in a single machine. Which, yay, cool supercomputer, but the distributed supercomputer with 5 times the machines runs just as fast anyways.
Huang is still a CEO trying to prop up his product. He'd tell you putting an RTX4090 in your bathroom to drive an LED screen mirror is unprecedented if it meant it got him more sales and more clout.
This is part of the rhetoric that pushed people towards Trump.
Instead of asking why they didn't consider voting Democrat or why Trump was a consideration you respond with the equivalent of "well maybe you're not an intellectual"
I've seen a trend of Democrats resorting to attacking anyone that has different views than they do instead of taking the time to understand.
It does nothing to bridge the gap and bring people to your side. The opposing view still exists without being challenged. I would imagine it just pushes some people into an echo chamber of their own.
You respond with the equivalent of "well maybe you're not an intellectual".
That isn't what they said. They said that the PhD, by itself, isn't sufficient evidence of intellectualism.
Which is a perfectly natural reaction to have to anyone who, like the commenter being responded to, holds up their PhD as a defense of their intellectual prowess.
I really don't believe this is just a trend in Democrats; Republicans aren't innocent of this either. They'll resort to the overused labels of "socialist," "woke," or "un-American" for anyone with progressive views.
The whole system is just so polarized that both sides absolutely despise each other, and so both side dehumanize the other. I don't see this ever improving, it's just a shit show where both sides blindfold themselves to opposing ideas and fling as much of it as they can.
Trump won the popular vote. So it seems you have two options:
1. Convince yourself that the majority of the country are in the "cult of MAGA" and that you will never win their votes. With this option Democrats will never win the Presidency again - in fact, Democrats can simplify all our lives and simply stop competing in Presidential elections! There's no point - the majority are in the "cult of MAGA" so Democrats can never win.
2. Do some introspection and realize that while a significant portion of country are in the "cult of MAGA", the reason Trump won is because another portion of the country is just fed up with the current vision of the Democratic party. https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-tale-of-two-machines
1. The average voter is complicit in voting in the person into office yes or do you think that Hitler magically got elected by Aliens?
That however does not correlate what so damn ever with what I said, I specifically said that people suggest democrats have to do amends with Republicans, the same base that foster actual lunatics who has called for the death of the opposition, who has said that the entire democratic party is degenerate oh and made fun of the attempted murder of Nancy Pelosi's husband.
Just say that you think the victim is to be blamed and that the perpetrator is innocent because they just HAD to do it.
2. Again love the victim blaming, let's not hold each accountable for what they do no let's only hold 1 side accountable who already tries to some degree to be accountable and instead gaslight and victim blame those who expect the republicans to take the same accountability.
Whenever or not people are fed up with the democrats is irrelevant when the opposition is saying actually crazy shit like "let me suspend the constitution for 1 day and I'll fix everything", sounds eerily familiar to "let me enact the enabling act, promise 1 month and I'll fix everything".
So you have presented me with: 1. victim blaming and 2. victim blaming, what a good choice.
But hey, hope you like me get to enjoy that juicy 20% tariff causing prices to deflate so much it causes an unsigned integer overflow.
Can someone explain how this translates for average American citizens? What have been the effects, if any, of consistently trading at a deficit since the 80s?
I've been trying to wrap my head around it, but it seems like there are so many factors at play that the effects aren't obvious.
My intuition is that maintaining trade deficits could cause inflation since US often needs to print money to service its debts. But, that only depends on consistent budget deficits. Inflation also depends on Fed rate somehow...Do consistent deficits increase housing prices? I'm lost..
I hardly know anything about econ. But, my gut feeling is that the effects of 40 years of trade deficits should be clearer than they are. It feels like maybe the status quo has been artificially propped up.