Posted by ck2 4 days ago
And what of its negotiating credibility? How can the other side trust that an agreement will hold in the future?
This is not a critique, but a genuine curiosity, because there's an obvious drawback with a system with opposing world views.
Unless, of course, something still unites them in the first place, with acceptable disparity on each side turning it into an advantage of flexibility and adaptability while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans.
>...According to Suetonius, Caesar's assassination ultimately occurred primarily due to concerns that he wished to crown himself the king of Rome.[13] These concerns were exacerbated by the "three last straws" of 45 and 44 BC. In just a few months, Caesar had disrespected the Senate, removed People's Tribunes, and toyed with monarchy. By February, the conspiracy that caused his assassination was being born.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Julius_Caesar
Congress 53/45 R; House 219/215 R
> creates the laws, the executive
Donald Trump (R)
> executes the laws, and the judiciary
SCOTUS (5-4 R)
> interprets the laws.
So Republicans create, execute, interpret, and enforce the laws. Congratulations on discovering how the party system works. Guess you're Big Poland (PiS) now. You can watch this on the news: Fox (R-Murdoch), CBS (R-Weiss), or read about it in the Washington Post (R-Bezos)
(snark aside, the situation where there's popular demand for authoritarianism is very dangerous, difficult to unravel, but like in Poland, it can be done once the public realize their mistake)
It's the Senate, not "Congress". Colloquially, "Congress" usually refers to the House of Representatives.
>SCOTUS (5-4 R)
> interprets the laws.
Actually, it's 6-3, not 5-4.
I get that you're not from or live in the US. Please understand, I'm not trying to insult or demean you. But you're making statements that are not true.
I believe the term is "FTFY." And you're welcome.
"Congress" is the name of the whole bicameral legislature, not either one of the houses, though "Congressman" or "Congresswoman" refers to a member of the House of Representatives.
FTFY
Lower courts. The track record of this administration at the SCOTUS is 90%.
Its not quite that high of cases (21 out of 25 where the administration is a party in 2025, per [0], with one additional loss since the beginning of 2026 (Tangipa v. Newsom [1] seeking an injunction barring the CA redistricting map, where the administration wasn't in the heading but was a party as a plaintiff-intervenor.) Note that all of the decided cases at issue are interim orders (orders concerning actions before the final decision on the case, where the Administration either wants an injunction or wants to not have an injunction against it, mainly), and reading the track record of the cases that actually get decided on the interim docket neglects the effect of the Administration's losses there on which cases it could appeal it chooses not to so they never reach the docket at all, as argued in [2].
[0] https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/01/looking-back-at-2025-the-...
[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-files/tangipa-v-newsom...
[2] https://www.scotusblog.com/interim-docket-blog/#the-federal-...
This is factually untrue; the Court, in Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), held that the President has:
(1) absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for exercises of core constitutional powers, (2) presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts, (3) no immunity from criminal prosecution for unofficial acts.
This is—while still problematic—very far from the President being “immune to all laws”.
Like, whatever happened to the Major Questions Doctrine?
The Supreme Court doesn't choose which docket to “use”; the interim docket (sometimes calls the “emergency docket” or “shadow docket”) is where applications for immediate action on cases that have not reached a final decision in lower court are handled. Decisions on the interim docket are more likely to be unsigned orders, but that's as true of the ones the administration has lost as the ones it has won.
They will simply have less goodwill when an American team is on the other side of the table, and give less benefit of the doubt. (as compared to say if a Swiss team is on the other side of the table)
Seeing what's possible in this position, I doubt future US presidents will hold back.
If, as an investor, I'm asked to throw billions at a multi-year project, political risk is going to be on the PowerPoint.
You may think this current administration is an aberration, but it serves to prove that aberrations can happen. That the levers supposed to prevent this (congress, courts) are creaking. Sure a judge ruled for now, but this is a long way from finished.)
And that's enough to create doubt. Lots of doubt. The impact of this on long-term future infrastructure projects cannot be over-stated.
(Let's leave aside that this project was 6 years in the planning, during his first term, before construction start in 2022... which just makes the current behavior worse, not better.)
Like say you can develop a 1000 windmill offshore wind project. At "market rate" for performing that activity they lose you money or make you very little, say a percent or two, because offshore is just harder.
But with government partnership and doors opening they make money at a low estimate 3%.
This causes you to forgo the 200 windmills in a field project that would make you a positive 1-3% regardless of which way the political winds blow because why do that when you can deploy 1k of them in some bay and make money hand over fist simply by joining hands (more tightly than the land based small project would) with government?
And as a result nobody can do the 200 windmill project because, between you and all the other people chasing the 100@% projects the cost of engineering, site prep, permitting, other fixed costs for such projects, etc, etc. are based on what the market will bear, and it can bear a lot more when your amortizing things over 5x as many units.
So maybe the things that do get invested in are more sustainable and financially conservative, which would improve public perception of them vs these megacorp-government joint venture type deployments we have now.
nothing is safe if the project can fail because the political winds change. Much less the political tantrums of the guy in charge who doesn't think you bribed him enough.
And when those obvious bribes are simply ignored by congress and the courts, thus validating it, the landscape for large projects of any kind get worse.
I wonder if both parties see the need for that at this point. There still seems a lot of 'but we are the good guys' in both partys blocking deep reform. If I'm honest, it took 2 world wars to partially whack that attitude out of Europe, and it's slowly coming back.
No, it isn't. This administration is a rupture. It is the beginning of a new normal. Future presidents will try to emulate this guy.
You could say "outlier" when he lost in 2020. You can't say that after he came back. The American people wants this authoritarian populism. The SCOTUS enables it. And the world shouldn't trust both the American people and its crumbling institutions.
If you have two parties that have much the same policies you do not get necessary change and voting becomes meaningless.
Often when a new party takes power, no big real changes are seen as it is not so easy to implement considering the real world. They have to go down some kind of middle path.
We know how to fix lots of problems, and money is orthogonal to the issue.
Sentences like "They have to go down..." are really a symptom of a static "there is no alternative" view.
Everyone would like that, but it is easier said than done.
> We know how to fix lots of problems, and money is orthogonal to the issue.
Great that you have the answer, so how do we fix it?
The past ~100yr of state policy has made a lot of economic winners out of people in these industries by putting it's thumb on the scale in their favor.
Any reversion to a "natural market state" or perhaps beyond, where the government weighs in to the advantage of those who do not make money on housing or healthcare would necessarily make loser out of all the people who right now benefit from the government having its thumb on the scale where it is currently positioned and they will fight tooth or nail to prevent this.
However, historically it made a lot more difference which party was elected.
In the UK in the 80s you knew that if you voted Labour things would bet nationalised, and if you voted Conservative things would get privatised. Since the centrist consensus (e.g. Blair and Cameron) emerged it makes a lot less difference.
That, IMO, is evidence that what has changed is not that the two parties are constrained from pursuing very different policies, but that they no longer wish to.
A few decades ago a very high proportion of Labour politicians were former trade union leaders, for example. Conservative voters tended to be more rural and more affluent.
Now a very high proportion are professional politicians who have never really done anything else. They are all people who have done well through the status quo and do not want to change anything.
I really dislike that this is a thing. Politics should not be a profession. That being said, the obvious way of fixing this (term limits) would just end up giving more power to the civil service bureaucracies, which has problems.
If you have a jetski which changes direction every 5-10 years that's terrible for long term investment, and terrible from a personal point of view too. Legalise gay marriage, then 5 years later it's oh no, lets make that illegal again.
Best to move to a stable country which isn't run by the whims of a dementia-laden madman.
I argue that we have a reasonableness standard we can apply here - "Lack of consideration" is what might void a contract indenturing a 20 year old idiot in an unpaid MLM scheme.
Consideration of the public is a factor.
> "Chicago's 2008 parking meter deal, a 75-year, $1.16 billion lease to private investors, is widely criticized as a lopsided, "worst practice" agreement. The deal, pushed through in 72 hours under Mayor Daley, forces the city to pay "true-up" fees for lost revenue, resulting in over $2 billion in revenue for investors [so far] while the city continues to settle costly disputes."
People are ignored, councils seem to rubber stamp things and the tactic at higher levels is to make a terrible decision and then attempt to use courts to delay any attempt to stop whatever the decision was. When it’s finally stopped, it will be done again slightly different and restart the lengthy court process.
The big problem is long term outsourcing contracts, that serves to get the debt off the government’s books. If anyone else did it they would be required to show the debt under off-balance sheet financing rules, but the government gets to set its own rules and gets away with hiding the real situation. Gordon Brown did a lot of this so he could pretend to have balanced the budget.
Apart from central government a lot of local authorities have done this too. Sheffield's notorious street management contract (the one that lead to cutting down huge numbers of trees) is a good example.
Political parties are mostly relatively small and under-funded huddles of second-rate individuals, who get told what to do by billionaire-owned media.
It's interesting how many and varied "minor parties" which are more genuinely grassroots have persisted in the UK despite the difficulty in scrounging up funding from the actual public, and despite FPTP being theoretically stacked against them. It's very different to the US, which despite all the talk of Federalism doesn't seem to have local parties at all?
The US seems to restrict the ability of minor parties to stand for election far more than the UK does. It varies by state but from what I have read you need thousands of signatures just to stand in many states.
FTTP does also favour parties with a geographically concentrated base such as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists and the NI parties. Geographical variations in the US seem mostly to be about which of the two big parties people back.
Is it? What stops the next one being an outlier, or the one after that?
Its going to take decades to recover from the whims of the US population (the plurarity of whom voted for this)
What does "recover" even mean?
Are we supposed to back to the good ol' days when the <pick federal agency> could hold a press conference announcing some grand new plan with <pick industry group> key person and <pick billionaire> standing in the background smiling because they know their people ghost wrote it to their benefit and the press would unanimously gush about how good it is if not copypasta the press release entirely?
Institutions are basically bankrupt of trust in the eyes of the public. Between that and the modern information distribution landscape the status quo circa like 1930something-2010something where the administrative parts of the state could "just do things" without organized resistance by the parts of the public that were on the losing end is likely never coming back.
Whatever you, and everyone else, wants to use state power to accomplish will likely have to dial back their ambitions and prioritize in accordance with the new reality of how much you need to fight for each thing, basically realign policy targets to be closer to the fat part of the "what everyone wants" bell curve. Maybe from there there will be a decades long re-accumulation of trust, but we don't know what the world will look like in the future and that may bring us to a very different status quo than the one we're exiting.
I know we all like to whine and screech about billionares and moneyed interests, but I think the new status quo is probably a bigger problem for them and other "string pullers" than the median member of the public who's getting shafted by it. Remember, the "status quo" of the last 100yr is what created the problems we have to clean up today and in the future.
Get back to the rule of law.
All this crap has been happening forever. It may very well be happening more now (probably is, IMO), but it's happening in the open. It's all being litigated. Every capricious decision that would have sailed right over the heads of the non-thinking morons with a simple stamp of approval, maybe a small lawsuit in particularly offensive cases, is now being scrutinized and seriously litigated, because the agencies and other "legitimizers" involves have burned through their stored trust, and now everyone is watching everything they do.
I see that as a huge improvement.
See for example the numerous wars against native Americans in the 19th century; even in some Washington US museum they admin the natives were not wrong when they had to assume any peace treaty was not worth the ink it was written with (and meant "we're only regrouping and will attack again in less than 5 years").
This is notably an area where the US is massively crippled. States can manage many year projects easier, but the federal government must conceal all such projects behind defense spending. Even that is wildly mismanaged (see: all the canceled naval purchases over the last two decades, and we still have an outdated, if large, navy)
We also have endemic corruption siphoning off funds all over the place, ESPECIALLY in the big projects that have the attention of the current administration.
(not sure what you mean by "corruption we tolerate in US allies"?)
There is extreme corruption in the U.S. as well, but we've legalized it so it disappears in statistics.
There were tons of economic low-hanging fruits by building out large infrastructure projects, which corruption happily siphoned off of.
The ROI of these infra projects have been gone for a while, yet they continued. Also it's been stealing intellectual property, trade dumping, exporting deflation. Soaking up the manufacturing oxygen of everyone else through subsidies, elite capture, then using the leverage gained and veiled threats against others to force them to yield resources, market access and political control.
The conditions the average Chinese works in are abysmal, even from the American point of view.
Another way of saying it is China took the most advantage. And it has gone way overboard in taking advantage. So the backlash is expected and necessary.
Part of fixing things involve doing things that seem like it's destroying the order that the US created itself.
Not a fan of CCP but pretending like there was no extreme poverty in China before CCP is insane position.
"They eliminated poverty... but at WHAT COST? They did good things but they trampled on the intellectual property of our beloved billionares? *sob*"
All the while going into a demographic death spiral. Partly cause by the draconian 1-child policy, which attempted to fix the pronatalist policies of Mao.
I'm not saying China is the best and whatever, just saying they've proven every "China is about to fall" headline that has been circulating around for the past 15 years. Maybe we should learn some things from them.
When you have massive buildups with no hope of returns, it's a a bad financial decision and the public carries the debt burden.
Pure BS
Now, recently, they had a very good run. This must be admitted and even celebrated.
But the aforementioned flaw is still very much present.
Sure, but that's contingent on
1) the voters being well educated and not easily brainwashed by various types of propaganda pushing them to vote against their own interests (see the Germans being anti-nuclear and pro-Russian gas since the 80s) and >
2) the voters being trusted and having an actual ownership in the country so that their votes affect them directly and also having a say in how their country is run, because if whoever gets voted into power just does the opposite of what the voters want "for their own good", then you're not a democracy anymore, you're just a well functioning state (if that).
Other than Switzerland, and maybe Denmark, I don't know any democracies that constantly function well and aren't plagued with issues.
The answer is contract law. Pulling the plug out of a project costs money.
Obviously this still requires a level of sanity which may no longer exist in the US.
Either we live in a democracy or we do not. Democracy determines the correct path by wobbling between two incompatible options - implementation and repeal. That which is implemented by one side, but not repealed by the other survives as the appropriate path.
There is no alternative to this - without abandoning democracy and universal suffrage.
Remember that democracy is the worst way to run a country, except for all the other.
Dozens of new GW+ wind farms came online in the last four years. This concerns a few projects in a few particular locations that are exposed to federal interference. It has impacts on the market but the market is larger than these minor disturbances by an order of magnitude.
> while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans.
We have private business in this country. They're doing just fine.
Thats not that much is it given the size and energy demand of the country? And that's over the past 4 years, you'll only see the true impact of this in the next 6 years.
> This concerns a few projects in a few particular locations that are exposed to federal interference
Markets are driven by a lot of feelings too. If you're trying to build a wind farm now, why on earth would you do that in the US? There are just many better options.
Your private businesses will happily skip over the US if they understand markets. Don't row upstream, find a place where your investment is wanted
No, but there's demand everywhere. So it's all down to how likely you are to get your money back?
And this is for adding power to the grid, if you have a major single customer you're already adding a ton of risk to your project... What if the datacenter is no longer needed after a few years or isn't completed ever?
What is it relative to these 5 projects?
> you'll only see the true impact of this in the next 6 years.
Are these the _only_ new projects that could _possibly_ be built in that time frame?
> a lot of feelings too
The feelings of those with money not of the general population.
> If you're trying to build a wind farm now, why on earth would you do that in the US?
You just said. "The size and energy demand of the country." Or are you proposing that no one would build unless we remove absolutely all risk for them? I'm not sure you and I mean the same thing when saying "private business."
> happily skip over the US
I believe this is a worn out trope. Please show some evidence this has actually occurred.
> find a place where your investment is wanted
Ah.. the "amazonification" of America. "Businesses shouldn't compete or take risks!" You seem to say. We must bend over and make them happy before they can deign to take our dollars. Perfectly modern and utterly ridiculous.
No, but a lot of the coastal waters are federal land (water? :D) which is why this is a problem to begin with. Wind at sea has a lot of benefits, no neighbors, nothing to interfere with the wind, typically very predictable power generation. So yes, you can build a lot on land, the US has plenty of space for that but that'll be subject to a LOT more pushback from the general public.
> The feelings of those with money not of the general population
And those with money are the ones making the investment decisions, no?
> You just said. "The size and energy demand of the country." Or are you proposing that no one would build unless we remove absolutely all risk for them? I'm not sure you and I mean the same thing when saying "private business."
You've followed all the rules, got all the permits, you're building and have invested x amount. And NOW the rug is pulled from underneath you? That's not a very comforting world to be investing in.
Or to put it in more general public sense. You want to build a house in city X. You get a plot of land, get an architect to draw up what you'll build, you get all the permits and are halfway through construction and THEN the city revokes your permit. You tell me, but I wouldn't try building anything there again because they are just unreliable. You go to the city next door.
> I believe this is a worn out trope. Please show some evidence this has actually occurred.
Happy to, compare these 2 charts.
USA: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-st...
Europe: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-st...
The US is basically just switching to gas power. And if you look at % of energy mix you'll see that wind is mostly flat as a % of the whole electricty generation. So yes, much much more money/investment is going into renewables in Europe. And as unpredictable as policy can be there too, they typically have the understanding to only change rules for NEW projects not existing ones.
> Ah.. the "amazonification" of America. "Businesses shouldn't compete or take risks!" You seem to say. We must bend over and make them happy before they can deign to take our dollars. Perfectly modern and utterly ridiculous.
Businesses should take risks and be rewarded for them. But take the building a house example above, would you agree that in general rules shouldn't be changed during the game/on existing projects?
If the Fed falls and monetary policy is subject to the political whims of a tyrant that only cares about himself, then we lost reserve currency stays and we are ducked so hard by simultaneous inability to continue the deficit and a need to pay back interest at far far higher rates. It would cause a spiral in the US economy like we have never seen. Or in the best case just a gradual switch from USD to other standin currencies causing a decade or two of recession in the US, best case.
So far most businesses have not jacked up prices from tariffs because they are hoping they can have the US Supreme Court overturn what look to be obviously illegal tariffs that should have been enacted by Congress rather than the king (we fought an entire revolutionary war over this!). If the Supreme Court doesn't overturn tariffs then we are at risk for inflation going up to 1970s levels.
The state of private business in the US is best represented by the meme of a dog sitting at a kitchen table saying "this is fine" while the house burns down around him. The firefighters may come, but they had better come soon.
Where are you deriving this from?
> is best represented by the meme
Ah.. well that offers a guess.
That's an abuse of the judicial system. Politicians are elected exactly because the voters perceive a need to change the execution of government's functions.
The thing is, you cannot beat human moral qualities with formalist means. People who come to power by raising hatred towards their political opponents will always find a way to subvert policies even if not cancel them.
Long-term policies should be established through consensus among all parties, not though legalistic bureaucracy.
Elected politicians can change laws and rules going forward, but there should be obstacles at changing past laws.
Congress certainly has the power to change this if they want to. But without something like the APA, private businesses exposed to federal regulation would struggle to make any plans beyond the current US Presidential term. So they do not want to.
Well, this is sort of against the spirit of the US constitution, at least as explained in the Federalist. I might even call it an abuse of the Legislative system.
I'm not speaking very confidently here, but by the spirit of it, the Congress should not do this much of micro-management of the Executive.
Surely the Congress should pass the laws which _prevent_ the Executive from doing stupid things, in particular collecting too much taxes, but it shouldn't really tell the Executive "do this, in this particular way".
To be honest, I suspect that the actual _reason_ every administration tries to undo as much of the actions of the previous administration as they can is because due to the amount of limits imposed on them by the Congress they they cannot do much else. Fighting the Congress is much harder than fighting the previous administration.
I seriously suspect that if the amount of regulation is decreased, it will actually be beneficial to long-term policy stability, because instead of fighting the decisions of the previous administration the current one would be busy with it's own projects.
That's the only way to work around Trump. According to the Constitution, no one can actually make the executive branch do anything it doesn't want to do.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...
This is absolutely nuts to read, and yet isn't the first time we've read such kind of language in court opinions and publications with this administration.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society
That aside: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/07/21/trump-cou...
Edit due to rate-limiting: that makes two of us.
>raises the possibility that the order halting construction will ultimately be held to be arbitrary and capricious.
But guys like Trump aren't arbitrary or capricious.
There's a pretty good consensus that he would have to be a lot more sensible by nature to reach that level of sophistication.
I'd encourage you to make a list of the top 10 things you're worried he's about to do now, and check back in a few months to see how many of them came true. One big transition point in my thinking was in July of last year, when I remembered how much he'd bragged in March that the Department of Education would soon be shut down. He does a large number of terrible things, yes, but he also can't do most of the terrible things he says he's going to do.
I don't have to "check back in a few months." Look at what he's accomplished in only one year: https://www.project2025.observer/en . Far more than he was able to do in his four previous years in office.
Trump is basically doing all the things that he wanted to do in his first term, but that were slow-walked, stonewalled, and sandbagged by the so-called "adults in the room." There are now very few if any of those adults left, and that includes judges who are willing and able to put a leash on him.
If you're not deranged, you're not paying attention.
In any case, once again: yes, some of Trump's actions are being blocked by the courts, and the Republicans are working to fix that by installing captive, corrupt, or incompetent judges.
the shape of how things actually work is what’s left when constant churn (and now budget blocking) is a fact of life
Obviously if you hate democracy you'll want to destroy this system, which is what they've been working at for the last 50ish years.
It is an interesting question of what changed in terms of ability to execute, but lack of funding isn't the answer. I suspect it is a combination of scope creep, application to intractable problems, and baumols cost disease at work.
Every regulation, whether it's environmental, DEIA or anti-fraud, adds a few steps to each project. With enough regulations and enough steps, things just slow down to a crawl.
As governments and legal systems get older, they get into more and more situations where a bad thing happens, and the politicians must show that they've done something to stop a similar thing from happening again. Nobody can publicly admit that it's fine to letting a 5-year-old kid die once in a while, even if that would be the right call. This results in more and more layers of regulation being added, which nobody has an incentive to remove.
Sure, there are such cases, but a lot of regulation was written in blood, and the price that affected individuals or even our whole species paid was often monumental:
Having cancer literally eat the workers faces is not acceptable (=> radium girls), nor are mistakes like leaded gas or CFCs.
Everytime people advocate for big immediate gains from abolishing regulations, you can be almost certain that they are selling toxic snake oil.
Current US admin seems no exception, especially when comparing related promises with actual results (e.g. Doge).
edit: I'm not saying that pruning back regulations is bad, but it needs to be a careful, deliberate effort and big immediate payoffs are often unrealistic.
Correct, but the tax system is nonetheless quite effective at setting behavioral incentives and disincentives. Higher income and estate tax rates incentivize capital being locked up in investments instead (for lower capital gains taxes); those investments put people to work and are subject to Labor negotiating higher compensation. Allowing donations to non-profits to deduct from other taxes allows private individuals (compared to a government bureaucracy) to more efficiently fund social welfare programs, which incidentally, also put people to work in the administration of such programs.
Funding government is not the sole goal of higher taxation rates, but rather, also how incentives in society are shaped.
> US taxes as a percent of GDP are at an all time high
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
It looks pretty steady around 17%. It was as high as 20% in the late 1990s. However, this does not include state and local taxes. I could not find a source for it. What is your source of information?
However, my main point was to refute the idea of some mythical past where the government was massively more funded, and therefore more competent and capable.
This also ignores the effect of the growing pie over time, but that is somewhat a tangent.
If someone is referencing back to the 1930s tax rates, those total receipts were closer to 10% of GDP when things like the Hoover Dam and Interstate System were being built.
Today, the rates are closer to 30% and the GDP being taxed is 25-30 times larger, controlling for inflation.
To me, this suggests that the reason we can't perform infrastructure projects is not lack of funding
These are the proportions we are talking about. It begs a lot of questions.
Are the projects really comparable? Did competence change? Did the working environment?
Quite simply the US had founding fathers who were ahead of their time, and some uncharted waters ahead of it.
This set the example for the decent navigators who took the executive positions, but momentum can only last so long.
You need decent people to come along on a regular basis to refresh the progress.
The very system that allowed for a gifted individual to have an outsized positive outcome, has always posed a real vulnerability if the decency is compromised. Whether that is a "natural" lack of decency or if compromises escalate over time, that's a weakness which is magnified when it does show up.
Different presidents have had this problem from time to time.
When you start with a country where the big advantage is being ahead of its time with an emphasis on more decency than average, it doesn't take somebody completely behind the times or absolutely disgusting to do serious damage. Even dropping the ball one time can be a major setback.
Just ask every respectable President in history.
Sadly this is an inherent weakness of the US constitution. It's old and it was written at a time where we didn't have enough experience with democracies.
In a modern parliamentary democracy you vote parties which form coalitions and settle on one of the party leaders (in general the one with most votes) as prime minister.
This means that:
- other parties are still involved in the legislative process. In a presidential republic with the president holding executive power, other parties are not represented at all. Trump doesn't need approval on his actions neither by opposition nor his own party. In a parliament, many members will support continuity on many topics rather than change if it doesn't make sense. They still vote based on their conscience, not just on their affiliation.
- the executive depends on its effectiveness and for staying in power on the support of its parliament members. If some members of Giorgia Meloni's coalition don't like the direction she's taking they are not gonna vote her proposals and ultimately she may need to resign if she gets a vote of no confidence. Removing a president in countries like US is extremely difficult in comparison, and the executive has no checks, neither from opposition nor its own party to go in whatever direction a single individual decides to go.
Seriously, what Belarus, Turkey, Hungary, Russia, etc, all have in common? They are presidential republics. Single individuals hold too much power and have little checks from their own party members, let alone a parliament. It's no coincidence that the last parliamentary democracy to turn into authoritarian state has been Sri Lanka over 50 years ago: it's difficult for individuals to grab power, as there is a long checklist of things that need to happen. In a presidential one?
It's very simple: a single individual can claim popular mandate, building a personality cult is simple (you don't vote parties, you vote individuals), a single individual holds executive power and is very hard to remove.
Presidential republics are more effective than slow parliamentary ones, but we should ask ourselves if our focus in 2020s, in advanced economies where things are objectively fine, isn't slow refinement instead of sharp turns.
(I'm not even American and I know this)
The constitution was meant to be a living document, adjusted over the years as the world changes.
But the very opposite happened, it became Holy Scripture, unchanging and never evolving.
The whole American system was based on the idea that the ruling class cared for "reputation", "honor" or "legacy". It was wholy unprepared for people who just don't give a fuck about all that and actively wipe their asses on existing rules and conventions.
Like going in front of Congress and just ... lying. Provably, verifiably lying. Zero recourse, the shame of lying used to be enough. And because of ancient decorum rules, the congress can't even say "you're lying" and google the facts right there and then, they have to do this idiotic perfromatic dance of asking the same question repeatedly and getting a word salad non-answer back for hours.
Or just not going for the inquiry because, why would you? There's no penalty past "losing face" for not going. Why bother.
The system was flawed from the start, but the people were still in there for the best of everyone so it held together and mostly worked. Politicians respected one another as people and humans, even though they differed in opinion.
I personally can't see a way back for USA without a massive purge in the government followed by actual ironclad laws and processes set in stone to prevent anything like this from happening again. Let congress google basic facts, let them call people liars to their face, give them their own execuitve branch that can drag people for hearings by force if needed.
And copy the German Federal Constitutional Court[0] system, they have term limits and people are nominated through multiple channels.
Of course, it never really worked out that way. We're simply at the end of that very long line.
So you end up talking with individuals where "the 2nd amendment says I can have guns, it's in the constitution" and "my favorite president should go for a third term, the 22nd amendment is just a technicality".
Well, for one by ensuring that 'long-term' means it starts at the start of a term and ends before the end of that term. At most that only rules out nuclear, at least wrt long term energy projects. And it's not like recent dem administrations were unfriendly towards nuclear. Vogtle 3/4 were approved early in Obama's term, and finished under Biden's.
Unless, of course, you assume (the ideal to be) an entirely anarchist business environment where whoever-with-resources can do whatever. Democracy, though, is not that.
I’m a supporter of it regardless of the cost, but for a “long term” project look at the California HSR, which was directly approved by voters 19 years ago and we’re still debating how to fund the majority of it, let alone actually build what we voted to construct and open in its entirety within 10 years.
Simple. You begin constructing an offshore wind park when someone competent is president, pause the project for four years during Trump's term, and then resume work to complete it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq0LsX_fCm4
I'll believe it when it happens. Traditional 1GW nuclear like the AP1000 is just such a huge financial bite to make these days that the only orgs big enough to do it are large consortiums of large companies, or nation state.
It's a tough position because the AP1000 has a much better chance of reaching affordability than SMRs, but nobody wants to spend the $50B-$100B in capital to produce uneconomic nuclear reactors in order to maybe drive down the cost of construction so that future reactors will be economic.
It's a very different situation for funding than solar, because there's small scale use cases where expensive energy makes sense, in places that wires don't reach, etc. etc., on devices, etc., and that's what really drove a lot of the early development of solar manufacturing capacity. That got it to the point that Germany could do subsidies to really scale up the deployment of expensive energy, and since Germany spent that money, it's been smooth sailing for the rest of the world.
The path for nuclear is not as clear as it was for solar.
"corruption"
No, half of the voters did not intentionally vote for this. Half of the voting public doesn't pay any attention and votes based on their finances or party allegiance.
You and I saw all the bad things to know what would happen. That was hidden from many people. Yes you can fault them for being ignorant, but that doesn't imply intentional malice
Anyone who voted for Trump in 2024 had his first term as a shining example of what the man is. This goes doubly for people who voted for him twice.
That's not really the point nor the problem, because some people choose to listen to very stupid or malicious people and others are (by chance or by skill) more susceptible to being steered by more credible people.
Half the country is in thrall with a uniquely malicious and moronic force, and the other half is vaguely in alignment with the vague directional gestures of expert consensus (even though it's sometimes wrong!). These are not at all the same, even if they both are technically "believing what people told them to."
Their beliefs are driven by a different set of oligarchs and imperial mandarins who have their own set of self serving reality distortion fields.
The companies which donate to both sides and the countries which collect enough komptomat are often able to set up bipartisan reality distortion fields.
In doing so you need to find a way to live with the cognitive dissonance. The best way is to truly buy into all of it, as hard as you can. That wins and keeps on winning. Or you can try to mitigate things to your conscience, but that leads to a lot of halfhearted efforts and poor turnout.
The American founding fathers were mostly of the opinion that political parties are bad and should be avoided if republic is to stand. Yet they found themselves organizing into parties before the ink was dry.
So the best we can do in practice is engineer the political system such that the damage from party groupthink is minimal.
I'm not sure as to solutions but I don't think they're impossible - something like an inoculation of the entire political class against the memeset that prioritizes winning over serving the constituents. Then if an unofficial party tries to seize power in a system that officially disallows them, the majority is already primed to respond in an organized way.
Large scale democracies only work when people are willing to live together. If you play democracy as a winner-take-all game, it's going to fail sooner or later.
I'm not convinced that anything works at the national scale, at least not over the long term. I suspect that the US, as one of the oldest-and-largest democracies, is demonstrating a path that others will eventually follow.
Fixed that for you.
There are democracies with proportional representation out there. Those have their own problems in forming coalitions, but the parties themselves are much closer aligned with their base.
I'd really like to give PR systems a try, if for no other reason than to do a reset on the current coalitions. I fear that they will eventually settle down into a pair of coalitions very similar to the current parties, but that leaves us no worse off.
It need not; you can have more proportional representative in a district based system (and still also have vote-for-person), using multimember districts with a system like Single-Transferrable Vote.
You can also get finer grained proportionality with Mixed Member Proportional which combines a district-based system (either single-member or a multimember proportional system described above) with top-up representation from party lists.
MMP would require Constitutional change in the US; but multimember districts with STV (in states with more than one seat, as well as increasing the size of the House so more states would have more than one seat) can be done by Congress without Constitutional amendment.
No, Keystone XL was not the same level of pettiness as offshore wind. Find me the IPCC report equivalent that makes the case for wind farms doing whatever social damage Trump says they do. I'll wait.
stupid + stupid = consistent -> wins
and the left wing version is
smart + stupid = inconsistent -> loses
The craft of "rationalist cover stories" as a class of band-aids!
Remember how you failed to help "black people"? The people who make the dems what they are today seem to more than 2 steps removed from that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46727418
The emotional concerns that underly this ineffective (akratic) behaviour seem to come from uh "rationalist suffering" (the modern day version of white man's burden?)
Piketty 2022 section on Educational Justice (page 1007) thinks that its because dems are the overeducated children of the "Brahmin left".
So I think you've got the right diagnosis- reps are the undereducated children of the "Merchant Right", so their rationalist* cover stories are naturally more convincing :)
*Pecuniary===rational as in the "Legitimation Crisis"
Ps: somewhat better (=less overtly social-darwinist) handwringing, but not quite a bandaid
After sitting and observing my local town's MAGA base for the better part of two years straight(by attending town meetings and joining all their facebook groups) it is clear that there is no real long term plan. They just love to get a rile out of others and deeply believe that Trump is doing great and that any problem is caused by someone else.
Its depressing trying to steelman that behavior because you realize that the country you grew up in had these people there. Growing up in the same town, everyone I interacted with was serious about excellence. My parents, my neighbors, my teachers and my classmates. There was this minimum standard where everyone from the businessman to the garbageman may have had different views on life but everyone still did their best every single day and still had this mentality of growth.
Its gone now. The cracks started to form after 9/11 when the quiet racists came out but it really seems like one grievance after another built up until Trump came along and caused all these people to put all their chips on supporting him do or die. Man going back to 2016 if Hillary had won, I wonder if the temperature would have come down. Part of the current hubris that they have is the same thing I saw under Bush(many Trump people are former all in on Bush supporters). They think they can do no wrong but eventually reality set the Bush people straight because when the economy crashed and people started to feel real pain, all those people went back into their caves for a while. I think the only thing that will stop MAGA is that the coming crash has to really really hurt. Thats when the jokes stop and they become serious again. It has to be absolutely obvious that Trump caused it which means that it has to be severe.
I often hope that maybe if Trump just peacefully passes away that it will finally fizzle out. Maybe thats a better outcome?
Maybe we should stop steelman them all the time. That is how they got enabled by centrists and pundits and moderates so much, they became the rulers. Steelmanning obvious bad faith actors is just another fallacy.
Steelmanning consists of ignoring disturbing claims conservative right says, not listening to what they are actually saying and replacing what they are saying by some feel good fiction of good intention.
Thats why I was so depressed. I have an engineering mindset of finding out how to improve things and there seems like there is no solution to this problem that involves remaining with this group as part of your society because it takes two to tango (ie. both sides need to put in genuine effort at growth).
The only person challenged by such steelmanning is opposition to MAGA. They now have two opponents. They are made look as if they were exaggerating or were crazy when they accurately report to what MAGA does or says. They now have an additional, basically unintentional bad faith, rationalization to deal with against them.
> there is no solution to this problem that involves remaining with this group as part of your society because it takes two to tango (ie. both sides need to put in genuine effort at growth).
The problem is that what happens is that the opposition to MAGA is constantly asked to do growth, to steelman, to concede and move more to the right to accommodate MAGA. It is highly asymmetric and provably does not work.
> I have an engineering mindset of finding out how to improve things
I think that making it clear what MAGA wants says and supports to moderates and center is way better strategy then basically helping them.
I think you misread what I wrote. Yes Steelmanning them is not challenging them. What I said was that if you go the other direction and challenge them it does not work either. It might makes you feel good but no progress gets made.
You put way too much emphasis into my original comment of steelanning them. The original goal of sitting and observing them for two years was to try to understand their mentality, their point of view to then figure out how to convert at least some of them. Thats where the depression came in when I realized that there is no plan, no ideology, and no real end state: just vibes in the moment. This is not a cohesive vision for the future of a country.
The movie Fahrenheit 11/9 builds up understanding of the theory using specific case studies on the behavior you describe. They also discuss efforts to try and fight back. It is a recommended watch for anyone interested in understanding the underlying reasons for how we ended up where we are now. I can't believe the film is now eight years old yet feels like it was produced right now. Some of the people who were high school kids in the movie graduated college and are now even running for congress to try to fight back against neoliberalism! :O
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25795665/gov...
And Putin. Two men, Trump, Putin and Farage.
Three men, Trump, Putin, Farage, and every far-right party in europe.
Among the people who are clearly involved in this conspiracy to deprive humanity of cheaper energy are...
The entire system needs to be smashed to bits for the good of the many. Because after all, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of a few, or the one. But not in current human societies -- currently we value cruelty and malice.
We're all guilty of this.
The Keystone XL pipeline had been partially constructed before President Biden revoked the permit on January 20, 2021 on his first day in office. About 300 miles had been completed when TC Energy officially abandoned the project.
there's been, in 2025, 983 000 people receiving disciplinary sanctions[0]. then:
1. either there's no corruption, and people are getting sanctioned for no reason
2. there's corruption
> Less incompetency
one thing they seem to do correctly in China, is to select their leaders not based on pure political skills, but on actual thinking skills: many of them come from technical backgrounds, and have been trained to think rationally.
furthermore, in my experience, Asian people, and Chinese in particular, also have better working habits − stronger wills − than most Westerners.
I'd still be careful about assuming they're really _that_ more competent. intellectual theft, propaganda, rushed work, all could contribute to a temporary illusion of superiority.
> Less freedom for stuff like protesting
this is a watered-down description of the actual situation.
you can get jailed, beaten up, tortured, killed, etc. religious groups seem to be the main target of the most violent treatments[1]. there's really no reason to target peaceful people, via such extreme means.
[0]: https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2026/01/30/investigations-in...
Is that true?
You're just compressing reality so the logic becomes simple. But your analysis loses the nuance. First of all no one said there's no corruption in China. Corruption is everywhere... saying there's none is a practical impossibility.
Second. In 2025 983,000 people received disciplinary sanctions.... If what China claims is true or even partially true it means corruption was reduced on a scale that cannot be replicated in the US.
You analysis is valid, but inconclusive.
>furthermore, in my experience, Asian people, and Chinese in particular, also have better working habits − stronger wills − than most Westerners. >I'd still be careful about assuming they're really _that_ more competent. intellectual theft, propaganda, rushed work, all could contribute to a temporary illusion of superiority.
First of all let me be frank. I am asian. I am genetically Chinese and culturally western. My comment was purely about centralized systems of government and how THAT effects competency and not at all about the competency of the population seperate from that.
That being said, average IQ in China is higher than the US, that is a statistical fact. I did not comment on how that translates into this argument or what IQ even means in reality. I'm going to avoid that argument because I have no opinion on it.
>this is a watered-down description of the actual situation. >you can get jailed, beaten up, tortured, killed, etc. religious groups seem to be the main target of the most violent treatments[1]. there's really no reason to target peaceful people, via such extreme means.
You're right. I did water it down. But I still stand by my point. I won't in actuality participate in activities that will lead to these types of consequences so restricting me of these freedoms is something I practically don't care about.
The religious argument is valid. But what do you think of scientology? Cults. Basically the religions that China cracks down on are religions it considers to be similar to scientology. Ultimately these things are bullshit. I'm not religious so, again practically speaking it doesn't affect me. I think most HNers are also atheist or agnostic.
Yup, it's a bit quick, I'll give you that. The numbers in 2025 were higher than in 2024, and in 2023, which could indicate that "it's not very effective" in actually reducing corruption.
I would guess that corruption is probably tolerated as long as it's not too visible, nor undermine people responsible for holding you accountable.
But it's really difficult to understand what's happening in China, because of the difficulty to get factual data.
> My comment was purely about centralized systems of government and how THAT effects competency
I would agree then than centralized government are likely to be more efficient. We've had kingdoms and empires all around the world for millennia, probably not by chance. In my opinion, they can be quite beneficial, as long as there's a substantial amount of morality driving the leading forces. For otherwise, they're efficient in the opposite direction.
China's leader banned Winnie the Pooh from the Chinese Internet because someone said they look alike. That's − dare I say − quite a red flag on many levels.
> I won't in actuality participate in activities that will lead to these types of consequences so restricting me of these freedoms is something I practically don't care about.
Well, it's fair enough, but it is − no offense − a rather self-centered view. It might not affect you today, directly. But it may affect you later, or affect close friends, your children, etc. Genuinely upholding morality within society has a bunch of benefits for everyone.
> But what do you think of scientology? Cults
Agreed.
> Basically the religions that China cracks down on are religions it considers to be similar to scientology.
People in genuine cults are suffering and being abused. Why on Earth would it be justifiable to impose upon them something far worth? If one decides to take down some cults, one may suppose that it's to actually help their members, not to beat the hell out of them; it doesn't make much sense.
There are many, way healthier and efficient alternatives than vicious crackdowns, especially if your intent is to protect the people.
> Ultimately these things are bullshit
I don't know; the most beautiful architecture, all forms of arts, etc. all were rooted in religions. All great men in the past were quite spiritual.
Also, you know, there are things like [0] which really raises eyebrows.
> I'm not religious so, again practically speaking it doesn't affect me. I think most HNers are also atheist or agnostic.
Perhaps it doesn't affect you directly again. But indirectly, or in the long run it might.
Religions are often caricaturally understood nowadays, which I believe is a cause for the increase of their rejection. Don't get me wrong, the caricatures are there for good reasons. But the caricatured things can't be reduced to their caricature − if one attempts to understand them thoroughly and accurately.
A caricature is but an indication of some issues.
[0]: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/cia-rdp96-00788r0019007...
Not true at all. The only difference between a cult and a religion is popular acceptance. That's it. Some people suffer in christianity, just like how some people suffer in scientology. Many people in both religions don't suffer at all.
Tibet is a country with a religion that believes in serfdom and slavery. That's why China doesn't like them.
>There are many, way healthier and efficient alternatives than vicious crackdowns, especially if your intent is to protect the people.
It's called a tradeoff. You can eliminate the disease now by excising it with some collateral damage or you can try to slowly excise it which can basically be completely ineffective. For example the US in order to avoid collateral damage of trampling on peoples freedsoms allows bullshit religions like scientology to exist.
>I don't know; the most beautiful architecture, all forms of arts, etc. all were rooted in religions. All great men in the past were quite spiritual.
Does beautiful architecture equate with truth? Does being great equate with reality? Scientology is bullshit as much as christianity. It's just you PREFER the christianity bullshit.
Additionally all of the things you mentioned are not rational or logical. Being a great man is orthoganol to religion, beautiful architecture is orthoganol to religion. Think critically.
>Well, it's fair enough, but it is − no offense − a rather self-centered view.
How is how or where I choose to live my life self centered? I am simply saying I prefer China's way. If you don't prefer it, then don't live there.
I think the problem with you, is that you think I'm self centered, but I'm not. You are. Think about what you're asking for. You're saying that my OPINION on China is wrong and self centered and that my thinking needs to be adjusted and you imply all of China and it's government must adjust themselves to the same style of governance as the west. You are imposing your view on others and declaring that if one doesn't hold YOUR view, they are self centered. Ironic.
>Perhaps it doesn't affect you directly again. But indirectly, or in the long run it might.
Well it depends. Cults are responsible for mass genocide in the US, so one positive way the crack down on religous bullshit will affect me is that there is less mass genocide from cults. Scientology just won't exist in China. But it does in the US and it's the long term consequence of many freedoms.
>Yup, it's a bit quick, I'll give you that. The numbers in 2025 were higher than in 2024, and in 2023, which could indicate that "it's not very effective" in actually reducing corruption.
Or it can indicate corruption is massive and pervasive and that the clean up will need to be equally massive and pervasive.
That's typically caricature. I encourage you to study things more thoroughly before allowing yourself to form an opinion. One simply can't know a subject before having thoroughly studied it.
> It's just you PREFER the christianity bullshit.
I'm not Christian.
Regardless, Christian teachings are freely available. Anyone can practice on their own. You'd be right to critic the church − the institution: people have done it for a while, hence in particular the fair amount of subsects.
Scientology's "highest teachings" are kept private. Its primary purpose seems to be raising money by abusing people's naivety. Compare that to the Christ's « love thy neighbor as thyself. » Very distinct essences.
Which one promotes social stability?
> How is how or where I choose to live my life self centered? I am simply saying I prefer China's way. If you don't prefer it, then don't live there.
I think you've essentially said « I don't care whether people around me get slaughtered, because I'm not the target audience. » Allow me to find this self-centered. And still to find it okay-ish.
> Does beautiful architecture equate with truth?
Not what I was hinting at.
> Additionally all of the things you mentioned are not rational or logical
They actually are, but I haven't articulated the reasoning fully. Nor do I feel encouraged to articulate it. If you're truly in good faith, enough has been already said for you to do your own research
Apologies, I assumed such from the way you described architecture. Few western religions have influence on architecture as much as Christianity.
>Scientology's "highest teachings" are kept private. Its primary purpose seems to be raising money by abusing people's naivety. Compare that to the Christ's « love thy neighbor as thyself. » Very distinct essences.
That's your assumption. I can easily assume that Catholicism primary purpose is to hide a ring of people who engage in rape and pedophilia. There are different angles to every religion, you're just indoctrinated with the most populist angle. In the same way much of the west doesn't realize the religions of tibet and falun gong have cult like aspects FAR worse then scientology.
>Which one promotes social stability?
Both. Morality is not required for stability.
>I think you've essentially said « I don't care whether people around me get slaughtered, because I'm not the target audience. » Allow me to find this self-centered. And still to find it okay-ish.
You're just twisting and manipulating the logic so you can maintain the moral high ground when in actuality you're twisting everything.
The first problem is I'm not talking about mass slaughter. When the fuck did that become the topic? Are you saying I promote mass slaughter because China promotes mass slaughter? You're under this western propaganda where you seem to think China is some futuristic cyberpunk city on top but underneath the system is bathed in blood, torture slaughter and evisceration. Nothing is further from the truth.
When China tortures, when china executes someone, it is for crimes that fit punishment. They won't execute you if you're in a cult. They will execute you if you stole millions of dollars. The debate is about degree but the overall severity is reasonable.
I'm sick of talking to people with a misguided view of China. It's like talking to a clown. Somehow people like you are convinced that it's just blood and evil underneath.
>Not what I was hinting at.
Speak in english please, don't speak in hints. I said religions were not true, you countered with architecture. Now you claim it was a hint. Hint: don't speak with hints.
>They actually are, but I haven't articulated the reasoning fully. Nor do I feel encouraged to articulate it. If you're truly in good faith, enough has been already said for you to do your own research
No they aren't. I don't need to do research for a country I'm highly familiar with and even lived there for quite some time. I'm going to be utterly clear: You are ignorant and you are illogical and you need to do research. I'm Chinese. And I was born in the states. I know both cultures intimately, you only know one through the lens of US propaganda.
Good faith my ass. If you were talking to me in good faith you'd concede your lack of knowledge.
I directly know people who lived in China, have been jailed and beaten there, and have literal scars to prove it. Hard to brush this away easily from my mind.
Not all people who express negative views on China are alike.
I don't mind you expressing your (ignorant) opinion, and I wouldn't stoop so low as to call it rude. It's just you're not knowledgeable.
>I directly know people who lived in China, have been jailed and beaten there, and have literal scars to prove it. Hard to brush this away easily from my mind.
I directly know people from prison in the US who have similar if not worse injuries and scars. They have also told me of people who have died due to prison violence. I understand how it's easy to selectively brush away the atrocities done in the US while only focusing on the Chinese. If I were like you, I would label it as "self centered" because you don't give a shit about prisoners in the US, you only care about your Chinese friends because they serve as evidence for your biased views against China. I'm so sorry but there's no other way to look at it.
>Not all people who express negative views on China are alike.
No, I never claimed this. But I did claim that you're wrong and ignorant. That being said... You do fit a typical trope that does often come from people who have negative views against China and it's selective focusing on certain things without looking at the big picture.
You have to know that I know people in the US who were in prisons where the prison guards allowed rape and violence to occur and turned a blind eye to it because it served their ulterior objectives. Does that action characterize the entire US? No. It doesn't.
Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory.
The result is predictable. I will never see a functioning high speed rail system in California in my lifetime. Neither will anyone alive today. Not because we lack money or engineering talent, but because the accumulation of individual rights makes collective action nearly impossible.
Now look at China. They decide to build it, and it gets built. If you are in the way, you move. If persuasion fails, coercion follows. Freedoms are not part of the equation.
That contrast is uncomfortable, but it is real. Freedom buys dignity and protection from abuse. It also buys paralysis. China sacrifices individual rights and gets infrastructure. California preserves individual rights and gets endless meetings, delays, and nothing on the ground.
You can argue which system is morally superior. You cannot argue that they produce the same outcomes.
That has absolutely nothing to do with civil liberties and everything to do with the adversarial legalism of the Common Law code and with property rights, which are quite a different matter. There are any number of Western countries in which individual or household property rights are not taken to constitute an arbitrary veto on otherwise legal state action: if a train is scheduled to get built, it gets built, and compensation is paid but vetoes cannot be exercised.
I agree there's things like eminent domain. I'm just saying China leans more in the direction of less rights overall which in turn leads to a more productive society.
Suppose there is one city where everyone has the right to build new housing on any piece of land they own and another city where everyone has the right to prevent anyone else from building new housing. These things are the opposite of one another, so they can't both be increasing the "freedom" of the public at large.
Now which city actually has more freedom?
Extreme individual freedom is often called anarchy.
The question is, in a "free country", does the government limit itself to punishing compelling violations with near-universal consensus like murder, or does it seize control over the micromanagement of dubious and petty violations like hypothetically marginally increasing traffic by carrying out a construction project?
It seems like the thing you're objecting to is the latter.
This isn’t about what feels compelling to you or me, nor is it a clean split between “near-universal moral prohibitions” and “petty micromanagement.” There’s a massive middle ground you’re flattening. Scale matters. Irreversibility matters. Civilization-level consequences matter.
Banning murder preserves a baseline condition for freedom. Large infrastructure projects don’t just “nudge” behavior or marginally increase traffic. They reshape cities, labor markets, land values, energy use, migration patterns, and political power for decades or centuries. They bind future generations who never consented and cannot meaningfully opt out. Calling that “petty” is just wrong descriptively, regardless of whether you support the project.
Once you acknowledge that, the question stops being “should the state only prevent violence?” and becomes “what kinds of collective decisions are legitimate when their effects are vast, asymmetric, and effectively permanent?” That’s not micromanagement. That’s the core problem of modern governance.
So no, the objection isn’t to the government punishing murder instead of being anarchic. It’s to pretending that civilization-shaping actions belong in the same moral bucket as minor regulatory nuisances. You can argue that such projects are worth the tradeoff. You can argue they should override individual objections. But dismissing them as trivial violations is an easy rhetorical move that avoids grappling with why people resist them in the first place.
Has there been any autocracy in the last century that has had better outcomes when compared to liberal democracy? (other than China)
If there was actually freedom and you wanted to build high speed rail, you would solicit investors, go negotiate for some land -- the power company has a bunch of transmission lines up the coast that run approximately parallel to the highways, maybe get that land, your trains were going to need power anyway -- and then you hire some people and start laying tracks.
"Everyone gets a veto" is the thing where you can't do it because the government won't let you even when you have the wherewithal and inclination to do it. That's the opposite of freedom.
Every time I visit SZ now it feels like the scooters are misrouted neurons firing in any which direction, with no respect for pedestrians, parking, or the rest of the city.
Look up "Nail Houses". The USA used eminent domain heavily in the same situation back when they were still building new infrastructure.
>Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object.
It's not the result of many individuals objecting. It's the largely the result of a few wealthy individuals objecting. Elon Musk has admitted to publicizing hyperloop largely to take the wind out of the sails of the proposed high speed rail. American democracy is for the rich.
Yeah. China is not THAT strict. But still building the rode around the nail house is something that wouldn't happen in the US. Eminent domain for other people is something I believe in for a better society.
>It's not the result of many individuals objecting. It's the largely the result of a few wealthy individuals objecting. Elon Musk has admitted to publicizing hyperloop largely to take the wind out of the sails of the proposed high speed rail. American democracy is for the rich.
Still it is freedoms + capitalism that enables this. Rich people objecting can get silenced. Jack Ma for example.
I think that comment about guns threw everyone off. People are very liberal on HN and at the same time very patriotic. They support gun control and ironically more freedoms at the same time so I think you and the other guy didn't realize that you both support China's lack of freedom in the aspect of owning guns.
As an example, Texas is a state that prides itself on freedom but is incredibly privatized. There's hardly any public land. The entire electricity grid is privately owned. Toll roads abound in every major city. Over 20% of homes have an HOA, so those Texans have people (basically a small corporation) telling them how to cut their lawn. Women can't get medically suggested abortions. Universities are told what to teach by donors and politicans. For a while, the Texas DMV was collecting fingerprints just to get a license. Is that really freedom?
I don't have the freedom to own a gun in China, but it's safer in China to the point where you don't need a gun. Practically speaking I prefer to have less freedoms simply because you need less freedoms for society to function better AND most of these freedoms that are taken away by China are freedoms most people never exercise.
Right?
But morality alone does not explain how the world actually unfolds. And using morality as a trump card to end the discussion only works if we pretend the world is clean, fair, and reversible. It is not.
The uncomfortable reality is that history does not grade outcomes on intentions. It grades them on stability, continuity, and what comes after. The question is not whether Tiananmen Square was morally wrong. It was. The harder question is whether allowing that movement to succeed would have produced a better long term outcome for China, or whether it would have fractured the country into something far worse.
At that moment, China was not a mature liberal democracy waiting to be unlocked. It was a fragile state emerging from famine, revolution, and internal collapse. Power vacuums do not fill themselves with enlightenment. They fill with chaos, factionalism, and often bloodshed on a scale that makes a single atrocity look small in hindsight.
The leadership chose order over moral legitimacy. They chose continuity over uncertainty. They decided that dissent, even righteous dissent, was a risk they could not allow. The cost was horrific. The result was a state that remained intact, centralized, and capable of executing long term plans.
And execution matters. A lot.
Today, you can live in China and experience a society that functions at scale. Infrastructure appears where it is planned. Cities are built. Systems work. The future arrives on schedule. For many ordinary people, daily life feels stable, predictable, and materially improved compared to what came before.
Now contrast that with San Francisco. A city that prides itself on moral clarity, individual rights, and moral signaling. A city that debates endlessly and acts reluctantly. A city where compassion has become so fragmented across competing claims that enforcing basic order is treated as cruelty. The result is visible on the streets. Not theoretical. Not symbolic. Real decay, real suffering, real dysfunction.
This does not mean repression is good. It means the world forces tradeoffs whether we consent to them or not. There is no system that gets everything. There is no button you press that yields justice, freedom, stability, and progress simultaneously.
China accepted moral debt to buy coherence and speed. The West often accepts paralysis to preserve moral self image. Both choices carry costs. One is just easier to condemn from a distance. The other is easier to live with emotionally while things quietly fall apart.
If you want to argue morality, you will win the rhetorical point immediately. Tiananmen Square ends the conversation. But if you want to understand how nations actually become what they are, you have to step into the grey zone where history operates, where choices are made under uncertainty, and where the alternative paths are not clean, heroic, or guaranteed to be better.
The world is imperfect. Every society is built on compromises it would rather not examine too closely. The honest discussion is not about pretending one side is pure. It is about acknowledging that values shape outcomes, and that no outcome is free.
There’s more to disagree with in the second half, but I’ll stick to my biggest gripe: America’s founding is steeped in moral principles, from its very founding document. In fact it is a two and a half century experiment on building a society around transparency, with the question of what is Right and what is Just at its core, and how does a society follow from that. And compared to where the world was when it was conceived, the experiment has certainly yielded vastly more results than your comment gives it credit for, by only looking at San Francisco today. It is evidence that the dichotomy between morality and building a society is a false one.
Meanwhile, tian an men square was in 1989, and the tension of “moral debt” is ever present, evidenced by its persistent censoring. When will it be paid off? And will the Chinese then say, “ok, we get it, that’s the price we had to pay”? Because if the ball suddenly drops and they rebel after all, as soon as censorship is lifted, you didn’t buy anything for that debt. So what then—keep taking out more moral debt? Forever?
China’s moral debt feels much like America’s national debt :)
Anyway like I said I loved the opening half of your comment though.
The same founding documents that insisted that all men were created equal, and that America was for, of, and by those men
but not THOSE men?
The same document that spent a significant quantity of it's rather short length handing out provisions to literal slaveowners?
Those same founders thought it would be better to split off the whole list of inalienable rights to a separate document that possibly could have failed to be adopted?
Nothing is more American than ignoring the history of what actually happened in favor of some totally rose tinted propaganda.
Have you read the federalist papers?
IMO mistake to frame censorship as a debt, when it's domestic investment in stability, just like policing or infra, or epidemiologic pathogen control. You don't stop investing in essential nation building. Simply part of domestic infosphere management against unwanted influence, which essentially all countries have recognized PRC is prescient. As for 6/4 specifically, future gens will look back and realize 3-4 digit deaths less than rounding error in terms of Chinese history, having 1000s yrs of events/context sharpens evaluation. Like how Mao 70% good, 30% bad evaluation will turn to 90% good, 10% bad, because what's a few 10s of millions starved to death when his engineering projects and industrialization efforts actually ended 1000s of years of reoccurring famine / Malthusian traps. It will be recognize as "price of future", i.e. retrospectives tend to evaluate empires less on carnage (which is assumed) but on the frameworks they leave behind.
>“The West” is more than just America.
The west is generally built on the same template as America, extractive exploitation of not only itself but others, aka, built off surplus blood and treasure from colonialism, except society indoctrinated to believe such is natural order and just. Generations pass, surplus snowballs to buy more rights and freedom and enable more introspection, where colonialism can be acknowledged as stain, but on the margins. West rarely acknowledge that often the fine line between able to experiment vs subsist is funded by foreign extractive surplus. Skewing global balance sheet of energy and resources enable building and experimenting and bribing peripheries, liberalism = luxury experiments derivative product of colonial surplus. We see how fast it erodes when physical resources contracts.
Regardless, when looting from another, the geopolitical balance sheet no longer remains domestic, like America, it starts geopolitical debts that likely can't be default without eventual consequence. Mistreated countries have long memories, and being mistreated, humiliated if you will (and we're not talking bout only PRC), those memories do not tend to soften with time, and can really only repaid in catharsis. AKA there maybe a day when global south develops/catches up and coerce the west pay their debts. It could be 100s of years from now or current events could hint interregnum where power shifts and debts are soon collected.
The assertion that being able to summarily execute people you accuse of corruption somehow reduces corruption is absurd. If that were true, places like Russia would have no corruption. Being a dictator just ensures that corruption flows your way as the leader.
You are also arguing against a claim that was not made. No one is saying that executions somehow purify human nature or permanently eliminate corruption. The claim is narrower, colder, and more uncomfortable: extreme enforcement can sharply reduce certain forms of corruption for long periods of time, and that reduction can produce real, measurable benefits that save lives at scale.
This is not theoretical. Take food safety. In China, officials and executives have been executed for large scale food adulteration scandals. Morally, that is horrifying. Practically, it created an environment where cutting corners suddenly carried catastrophic personal risk. The result was a rapid tightening of compliance in industries where negligence or fraud can poison millions. Fewer tainted products means fewer dead children. That tradeoff does not become imaginary just because it makes us uneasy.
The same logic applies to infrastructure. When corruption in construction is treated as a capital crime, bridges do not collapse as often. Buildings are less likely to be built with fraudulent materials. Rail systems are less likely to be sabotaged by kickbacks and subcontracting fraud. One execution looks monstrous in isolation. The thousands of lives not lost to structural failure rarely make headlines because they never happened.
Singapore offers a milder but still illustrative example. It did not rely on executions, but it imposed severe, credible punishment and relentless enforcement for corruption. The outcome is one of the least corrupt governments on the planet and a state that functions with extraordinary efficiency. The lesson is not that brutality is good. The lesson is that consequences matter, and when they are weak, delayed, or politically negotiable, corruption flourishes.
Russia is not the counterexample you think it is. Corruption there thrives precisely because enforcement is selective and loyalty based. Power protects insiders rather than disciplines them. That is not what happens in systems where even high ranking officials can be credibly destroyed for crossing certain lines. Treating all authoritarian systems as identical collapses meaningful distinctions into a slogan.
You are framing this as a moral debate because morality is the easiest place to win rhetorically. Summary execution is evil. Everyone agrees. End of discussion. But that does not answer the structural question of why some societies manage to enforce standards at scale while others drown in fraud, decay, and institutional rot.
The world does not offer clean choices. Every system kills people, just in different ways. One system kills visibly, deliberately, and brutally. Another kills slowly through negligence, corruption, drug tainted streets, collapsing infrastructure, and the quiet abandonment of public order. One death looks shocking. Ten thousand avoided deaths look like nothing at all.
If you refuse to engage with that reality, you are not taking the moral high ground. You are opting out of the analysis entirely. And calling that insanity does not make it go away. It just signals an unwillingness to sit in the grey zone where cause, effect, and moral cost actually live.
But a windfall for the litigation financier that buys those claims off the U.S. government.
These leases are contracts. Sovereign immunity is curtailed when the U.S. contracts.
Wind farms produce electricity which pays for the investment when you finish but pays nothing when a stop early. This makes stopping early extremely economically harmful.
Glish supported networked remote procedure calls, made then almost transparent to the program. Otherwise, Glish was roughly similar to Tcl or Lua.
I don't know what other bits and pieces got salvaged from the SSC project.
Otherwise it seems like we spent a lot of money on a 17-mile hole in the ground in North Texas.
US corruption.
Incompetence would've been a good news here.
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1puwkpj/democrats...
https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1qu6vyu/trump_cal...
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5716988-democrats-scor...
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/01/nx-s1-5695678/democrat-taylor...
The real question is, once the Democrats are back in control of at least one house of Congress, are they going to be sane or are they going to spend two years making such fools of themselves that we end up with another Republican President in 2028?
Equally unfortunate is the need for 60 senate votes to actually have a meaningful say over what the president does. And in truth no part has had "control" of congress to this level for a while.
When one (or indeed both) sides are politically incapable of being bipartisan (witness the outcomes for those voting against party lines, on both sides) control of one house is meaningless and a majority in the senate (short of 60 votes) mostly meaningless.
Expecting any change in behavior after November, regardless of the results, is wishful thinking.
And the difference between 49 and 51 is still pretty damn important because "majority" has a lot of procedural consequences that are not irrelevant.
None of this has any actual weight, it's all theatre. Which doesn't mean it lacks consequences, but they could at any time just sweep it aside and they choose not to.
Ironically, one thing the Senate does constitutionally need a super-majority for and can't just change the rule is Impeaching the President. Which means that so long as Republicans have enough votes and apparently still believe loyalty to one corrupt rotting bag of shit is their purpose in life he can't be impeached.
It's called the "nuclear option" because actually using it is mutually-assured destruction. They're not so stupid that they can't foresee ever being in the minority again when changing a rule where that consideration is the blatantly obvious cost.
Somehow the Democrats were that stupid and did it for judicial nominations and both parties can see how that came back to bite them.
> Which means that so long as Republicans have enough votes and apparently still believe loyalty to one corrupt rotting bag of shit is their purpose in life he can't be impeached.
The real purpose of impeachment is for when there is widespread consensus that someone so pressingly needs to be removed from office that it can't wait until the next election. It's for when they're so bad even their own side won't stand for it, not for when you hate the other party's President and catch a slight majority in the midterms.
But if you retake the legislature then maybe consider adding some new restraints on executive power to those hefty must-pass omnibus bills. It might be worth doing something about the problem in general instead of just that one specific jerk?
Don't get offended that Trump is more brazen about anything than anyone else and try to retaliate against him in particular, instead change the things that need to be changed so that nobody can do those things anymore, even when they're acting like they're not.
For example, pardons are for sale. Thats pretty obvious. maybe it's been done before (?) but certainly not on this scale and not so soon in the term.
Secondly he's set up a direct method for paying him, TrumpCoin. That's different to campaign contributions. And indeed quite a bit of trumpcoin is being sold to foreign govts. I'm gonna put that in the "new" column.
In terms of international relations it's all new. He's blowing up trust in the US, via tarrifs, threats to invade a NATO country and so on. This is long term damage at unprecedented scale for no apparent actual gain.
There are plenty of laws which say he can't do any of this. Adding more laws is not the solution. A weak congress, and a weak Supreme Court unwilling to enforce the laws is the problem.
This seems like a pretty good example of how Trump is "different" but not actually different.
The traditional way this works is through prosecutorial discretion. You make friends with the politician and then when they're in office you don't get prosecuted or the case gets dropped or settled under favorable terms. Example: When Bush got elected, the antitrust case against Microsoft was effectively made to go away "for some reason" (https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-political-...).
Doing the same thing with pardons is way more conspicuous, because instead of something that doesn't happen (prosecution) you have something that does happen, and in public view (official pardon).
Politicians traditionally care about distinctions like that because it makes it much easier to accuse them of the thing, whereas Trump DGAF. But it's fundamentally not a different thing and the actual problem isn't that Trump isn't being subtle about it, it's that they should not be getting away with it even when they are being subtle about it.
> Secondly he's set up a direct method for paying him, TrumpCoin. That's different to campaign contributions.
Eh. It's not that much different to campaign contributions and it's not really different at all to the longstanding practice of politicians or their family members owning a private company which then gets into a bunch of peculiarly advantageous business dealings while they're in office.
> In terms of international relations it's all new. He's blowing up trust in the US, via tarrifs, threats to invade a NATO country and so on. This is long term damage at unprecedented scale for no apparent actual gain.
The problem with this one is it's the hating the other party's President one. Congress passed a law letting the President set tariffs, didn't repeal it for many years, and then the President started setting some tariffs. You can argue that it's a bad policy, you can argue that they should repeal the law that lets him do it, but he ran for office saying he was going to do this, got into office, and now he's doing it.
> There are plenty of laws which say he can't do any of this. Adding more laws is not the solution. A weak congress, and a weak Supreme Court unwilling to enforce the laws is the problem.
There are two kinds of laws in this context.
The first is the ones that punish him for doing something. Those are useless in this context because the executive isn't going to prosecute itself so you're down to impeachment and for that you need bipartisan consensus.
The second is the ones that prevent him from doing something. Take away the law that lets the President set tariffs and he can't unilaterally set any tariffs.
"Are the democrats magically going to be able to have 100% control of the government despite only holding a tiny majority in the lower house? If not, I'm going to yet again blame them for a failure that is actually just the constitution working as it clearly states"
The US system is not designed to give democrats any power by holding a small majority in a single house. The power granted in such a case is the power to prevent change.
FDR was able to reform and change things the way he was because Democrats had something like 80% control of both houses, and that's how the threat to pack the Supreme court carried weight: Because he could actually do it.
You want democrats to have power? You want them to be able to put these criminals in jail? You want to be able to reform the system to reduce the chance of this horseshit happening again?
Then you need far more than a small majority in one house. You need actual control.
It's much easier to obstruct and prevent and destroy, so Republican policy of tearing shit down and stopping normal legislative progress and ensuring our congress passes no laws to deal with obvious bullshit like rampant corporate fraud that would make Enron blush is just naturally advantaged.
They're not supposed to have 100% control of the government. Nobody is. They're supposed to prevent the Republicans from doing dumb stuff, just like the Republicans are supposed to prevent them from doing different dumb stuff because they have different constituencies. Only when they can both agree is when the government should be doing something, and even then you often need help from the courts and the states because the thing they both agree on is that someone is paying them to do something bad.
The best government is the one that does exactly what it should. The second best is the one that doesn't do things that it should; in that case someone else can do them, like the states or the market. The worst is the one that does things that it shouldn't.
> FDR was able to reform and change things the way he was because Democrats had something like 80% control of both houses
FDR was pre-Nixon and had 80% control by sweeping the South and losing New England. People forget that the original purpose of the minimum wage was to prevent black people from taking jobs from white people by offering to work for less money. Most of FDR's policies were economically illiterate or political knavery -- social security was created with the solvency of a pyramid scheme which is why the trust fund already has a negative growth rate and is soon going to run out of money now that population growth has leveled off.
That kind of authoritarian steamrolling over the opposition is exactly what nobody should be able to do, not least because it most often happens when people are heated about something and willing to start hastily implementing half-baked ideas with long-term consequences if given the chance.
> It's much easier to obstruct and prevent and destroy
If only! A major defect in the existing system is that the high bar meant to keep bad laws from making onto the books to begin with is also applied as the requirement to repeal them. Combined with the tendency for the powerful to defend the status quo that secured them that power, the result is that bad laws accumulate and how to be effective in destroying them is an unsolved problem.
Based on what I've read a lot of people who voted for him subsequent times thought that would continue.
> Several of these projects are near completion and are likely to be done before any government appeal can be heard.
Just gotta keep grinding towards success.
Don’t think in years, think in half decades and decades. This too shall pass.
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
> under attack on all fronts by the federal government
That seems hyperbolic. There's a lot of rhetoric, certainly, but executive orders are toothless against the states and they all know it.
And judicial orders are toothless against the federal government... And the states can't lift a finger against any deployment of federal power against them, whether it's legal or not.
What recourse will a swing state in November have against ICE goons being deployed to do Kavanaugh arrests in voter lines?
And it didn't even make the headline of the article I read it in.
And he's being spreading lies about elections for years. Again, not regularly mentioned even in critical articles about him, because it's so normalized.
He is also actually successful at making Project 2025 reality. He is on the way to cause very real harm (economic, physical) to blue cities too.
And in terms of legislative impact he is the least successful president in history. I don't like the corruption one bit, but on balance it is probably the less damaging of the two.
> He is also actually successful at making Project 2025 reality
Not at all, though, on any kind of permanent basis. He is showing that you can make the executive branch do shitty things with executive orders. What he isn't managing to do is codify any of this in law. There's a reason that the universities and other 'elites' knuckle under and cut deals with him -- they know that these deals are informal and temporary, and go away with the next POTUS. If Trump took this agenda to Congress and got it enacted into law it would persist for many more years.
That's basically what the administration was trying to do here, under a legal system which (unlike Venezuela in the 70s) is very keen on protecting corporate investment. It seems like a classic "takings" case.
for Venezuelan oil leases to be comparable to wind farms you'd have to have the Venezuelan govt say "we are taking the leases away because we don't want any more offshore oil production", rather than "we are taking these leases away because you are rich and we want to pump the oil ourselves"
the cancelled Venezuelan oil leases were a taking, but that word is less useful in the case of wind farms. I would imagine firms with wind farm contracts would be made whole (i.e. get back lost investment, but not get back potential profit) but it's not a case of the wind farms being given to somebody else or those areas being put to some other use.
if you are "environmental" you might think it's a great loss not to pursue the wind approach, or that it's a great idea to shut down offshore drilling, but that's political not property ownership/taking.
That isn't a crazy interpretation of what actually happened. According to wiki [0] the industry basically collapsed to 50% of its former production after the nationalisation era and the overall trend since then has been downwards. If a major political contingent in the US sets themselves against wind energy it could easily play out similarly. That'd be in line with other battles in the War on Energy that played out with nuclear and fossil fuels.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Venezuelan_oil_...
Wait..what? Made whole by whom? Has this happened before?
(I'm genuinely curious, I've not seen this brought up before...)
It's better to have your natural resources stolen than having your whole country wrecked by embargo, secret NSA plots, etc..
Steelmanning the risks, its the link to mainland as a weakness in supply chain of power, compared to onshore sources possibly. But, the construction is in close water, well inside the exclusive economic zone. You would think passage of a craft capable of causing a power shock with an anchor chain was raising hackles well before this, because it's hugely unusual for a warcraft of another nation to be that close without an explicit permit. Under the Jones act, all inshore commercial craft delivering goods to and from named ports have to be US badged, for international shipping it's clear from the baltic there's a concrete risk, but that's a matter of policing the boats, not banning the structures at risk.
A second steelman might be some belief about the intermittency. Thats easily knocked over because the system as a whole is building out storage and continuity systems, is adapting to a mix of technology with different power availability throughout the day, and of all the sources of power, wind is one of the most easily predicted to a useful window forward. You know roughly when a dunkelflaut is expected inside 48h, if you don't know exactly when, or for how long. Thats well north of the spin-up time for alternative (dirty) sources of power, if your storage capacity isn't there yet to handle it.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/trump-offshore-wind-...
Gas generators can be spun up to provide megawatts in seconds btw. With less than a quarter of the grid being renewable, intermittency is not an issue. Grids are built with resilience in mind (or at least should be...).
Only if they're already spinning and everything is hot and ready.
Non-spinning reserves can take hours to bring online. Cold power plants cannot be brought up quickly. The simplest designs can ramp within a few minutes, but these are generally not intended for any kind of continuous operation due to efficiency concerns.
ie. They can nibble a bit at an array before you're onto them Vs everything gets thrown at a point source target.
But none the less, yes. This would be a risk. Perhaps one which demands better drone detection and defence systems around wind turbines and O&G fields?
Recall the context - a field of many wind generators Vs one or two platforms in order to "take down" a state's power grid.
Ropes are strong because of many strands.
I thought fields had 100s of square km of extent too. The exclusion zone after nordstream is now pretty big, albiet "temporary" according to the web its 5 to 7 nm so 9 to 13 km so close to 100 km^2
No it does not. Even if you'd manage to disable an entire wind farm, the impact on the grid as a whole is negligible. An attacker has to spend a whole lot of effort on such an attack for very little, if any at all, gain.
In contrast, shell a port or the right piece of infrastructure [1] and entire economies can get wrecked. And shell an oil rig... I mean, I seriously hope even the Russians don't sink that low but hey they did attack a goddamn NPP and a hydropower dam... anyway, taking out an oil rig risks an environmental disaster similar to Deepwater Horizon. That's a lot more effect for an opponent.
The actual threat to wind farms is software. We've seen that in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine - the Russians took down satellite modems [2], causing about 6000 wind turbines to lose their command infrastructure and thus stop generating power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_colla...
Its completely in-line with his personality to hold onto personal grievances for decades to the point that they become policy.
I feel like much of what he does today can be directly attributed to the epic roasting he got from Obama at the correspondents' dinner. Most of us would be absolutely honored by being roasted by the sitting president, but he seemed at the time to take it very personally.
Not just the fact that Scottish wind farms prevailed, also that he was relentlessly mocked, ridiculed, and protested against in unavoidably visible ways by the Scots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NNWmZwObZc
( Note: while a recent youtube clip, the anti Trump protests in Scotland date back to well before his campaign for his first term as POTUS )
To speculate on what this risk is, the two obvious risk I can think of would be:
- Susceptibility to seabed warfare[0]. A rival nation can sabotage the infrastructure and maintain deniability, like we have seen with the Nord Stream sabotage[1].
- Potential interference with passive sonar systems, the turbines are likely to generate a fair bit of noise, which could potentially make it harder for SOSUS[2] to detect rival submarines.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabed_warfare
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage
The former is a threat vector but one that can be priced into the ongoing maintenance costs.
We didn't see that with Nord stream. It was not a rival nation, but an allied one unfortunately. And Germany did nothing. Zero.
You don't always need to present the other cheek to do right. Neither do you always need to retaliate.
Nord Stream finally made it clear to Germany that "convenience" isn't a durable energy market strategy.
It's not correct though that Germany has done "nothing". The suspects are pursued by Germany, https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-poland-blocks-extradition-... so there's that.
If you mean though whether there's a will in Germany (nevermind a commitment or funding) to rebuild Nordstream ... you're right, nothing has happened
Convenience, and cheap gas, was definitely a good strategy. Up until the point where our ally, the USA, would try to get Ukraine to NATO, provoke Russia to invade, and then help the Ukrainians blow up the pipeline.
The world is moving away from the US and I really cannot wait. They have done much more damage globally than good.
The only way they can keep their jobs working on vastly inferior, dangerous technology is to ban new, safer, better technology.
Different as from a distance but still a lot of applicable skill and team work experience transfer for many workers.
https://www.uppermichiganssource.com/2026/01/29/tim-walz-say...
> MINNEAPOLIS (Gray News) - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he will not run for elected office again.
> Walz touched on his political plans in a recent interview with cable news channel MS Now.
> “I will never run for an elected office again,” Walz said. “Never again.”
> The 2024 Democratic vice-presidential nominee said he plans to “do the work” while finding other ways to serve the country.
But I think Mark Kelly is likely to be a top-tier candidate from the jump. He's not my favorite of the bunch, necessarily, but I'd consider putting money on him being the Democratic nominee in 2028.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/gavin-newsom-short-circu...
> “Republicans should say, ‘We want to take control of this. We need to take control of voting in at least 15 places.’ Republicans should nationalize voting,” [Trump] said on the podcast of former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, which was relaunched on Monday.
It means Trump is sucking the oxygen out of the room. Again. I wish we would quit reacting to every stupid thing he says.
As a rule, Trump supporters treat him like a buffoon, a liar, and instigator. The only people who seem to believe Trump are his opponents.
People are fed up. Assuming there will be free elections - as absurd as it is to even write this sentence referring to the US, but here we are [2] - it most probably will end in an utter wipeout for MAGA. They'll have the President, of course, but assuming the Democrat leadership finds some spine - again, an assumption, given Schumer - stuff has the potential to change.
On top of that are state and local level elections that are all the time. Stuff like school boards, sheriffs, whatever that is where MAGA and the Evangelicals built out their initial networks. All of that can be flipped around as well, if people actually bother to show up and vote.
[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shootings_by_U.S._immi... - it is notable that widespread outrage only followed after the execution of Renee Good and Alex Pretti
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/02/georgia-fult...
It's a shame that the US is being actively sabotaged by Republicans and Trumpists and people will continue on because saying that is apparently a capital-p Politics and not an objective fact.
the post i replied to didn't present any substance either
there's serious ecological problems with these turbines, the materials cant be recycled, and their uninstallation is incredibly costly
they just don't seem like a great source of energy
Maybe if you look at the comment context a little more objectively, you'll agree there's some thing quite funny about it.
_______________________________
Putting that aside though, lets look at your claim:
> there's serious ecological problems with these turbines, the materials cant be recycled, and their uninstallation is incredibly costly
First of all, it's only one subset of the materials (the fiberglass in the blades) that are difficult to recycle, the vast majority of the actual material is highly recyclable steel. The blades in a modern offshore turbine usually weigh around 80 metric tons at the high end.
Your typical modern offshore wind turbine has rated output of around 15 MW of power, with a yearly capacity factor of around 40% at the lower end, so an average output of around 6 MW. Multiply that by the more or less standard 25 year rated lifetime of the turbine, that means you can expect the turbine to produce around 1300 GWh of electrical energy over the course of its life.
How much energy is 1300 GWh? Well, to get 1300 GWh of electricity out of a high-efficiency (i.e. 50% efficiency) natural gas power plant, you'd need to burn around 175,000 tons of natural gas, (dumping all of the waste product into the gigantic open sewer we call our atmosphere).
That's about 3 orders of magnitude more mass in natural gas that will need to be burned (and don't forget, natural gas is non-recyclable!!1!!1) than the blades weigh.
This means that you went and tossed a thousand wind turbine blades in an incinerator for every turbine you actually install, you'll still break even on the amount of non-recyclable material
So forgive me for not taking your complaints very seriously.
And you didn't address the environmental damage to the oceans. this case is specifically greenlighting off-shore windfarms. Iif this was on land, i wouldn't care what people do with their own money and resources. But it's got serious implications for whales, of which there's a decreasing amount of. It's not foolish to care about endangering species that are important parts of underwater ecosystems.
You should take complaints seriously in general, I'm not mocking you for your point of view, those are nice details, and I take them seriously, so why are you mocking me? Mocking people over serious topics is just a display of insincerity. you seem to care a lot about the topic, so why not represent yourself better?
Those are also tiny marginal percentages relative to the amount of fossil fuels that are saved, even if everything is constructed from virgin materials instead of recycled.
> But it's got serious implications for whales, of which there's a decreasing amount of. It's not foolish to care about endangering species that are important parts of underwater ecosystems.
The largest threats to whale populations currently are
1. changing ocean temperatures and PH stressing them, and disrupting their food chains
2. overfishing disrupting their food supply and stressing them out
3. getting entangled in fishing nets, and being struck by boat propellers
Wind turbine installation may be a brief stressor when piles are driven into the seabed (but there are mitigation techniques), and operating noise from wind farms might be a mild irritant for them, but it's quite minor relative, and geographically constrained compared to other more significant day to day noise sources in the ocean such as a shipping, drilling, and fishing.
The impact of wind turbines on whales is inconsequential compared to other much more acute impacts (especially net entanglement and boat strikes). There's a pretty wide literature on this.
> You should take complaints seriously in general, I'm not mocking you for your point of view, those are nice details, and I take them seriously, so why are you mocking me? Mocking people over serious topics is just a display of insincerity. you seem to care a lot about the topic, so why not represent yourself better?
I don't take your complaints seriously because your complaints (whether by accident or by design) happen to very closely coincide with deliberate misinformation spread primarily by fossil fuel companies to try and limit threats to their business model.
At least with Trump, there is no more pretending. It's gas, gas, gas and pollution.