Yeah, I used to believe that too. But it’s not true; American workers are shockingly productive compared to European ones, even when you take hours worked into account. And having worked for a German company in the past, I can see exactly why (too long to go into here).
Is it true that the USA is basically immune to foreign invasion?
Immune? No. But invading the United States would be enormously difficult and would nearly require the cooperation of Mexico or Canada (or both). And like most countries with nuclear weapons, we’d nuke the shit out of our own territory before we’d allow the country to be fully taken. And here I am not just speculating — that exact scenario in war games is often the only time that nukes are used.
Any foe that attempted to invade the US would pay such a heavy price it’d almost never be worth it and the chance of success is low. Also, the US is gigantic and its geography extremely challenging.
And then if you somehow as an invader won against the organized military, you’d have to deal with a well-resourced and capable resistance after that.
Good luck with all that.
According to modern pseudo-feminists, what Dorsa did is unfeminist. The compulsion found in modern feminism to worship the gender-based restrictions of radical Islam and to condemn those who do not has been some strange shit to see, hasn’t it? I sort of understand how it developed but damn it still makes no sense.
Anyway, good for her. It takes real guts to abandon your culture and country and live more freely. In this I agree with Noah Smith: we need many more smart people like her here.
It is worrying that countries like Germany, Canada and the UK have thrown their whole economies in the toilet and don’t seem inclined to do much about it. We were strongly considering immigrating to Canada, but with their downward trajectory it’s not even a real option any longer.
The US at least is on some sort of track to try to correct the worst of this tendency to self-destruction. But if we could just defeat rampant NIMBYism, we could do a whole lot better.
People will miss Pax Americana when it’s gone, despite all the flaws and mistakes made.
Something people who spend their entire lives on the East Coast of the US don’t appreciate is just how much emptier the West is than the East. It’s a huge difference. There’s not many places in the East that you can drive for a few hours and not see many obvious signs of human habitation.
But in the West, that’s trivial to do.
Even though I was already cynical politically and jaded, Obama burned me badly. I’ll never be excited about a candidate again. I am absolutely certain Harris will break most of her promises and will most likely be a middling president. In our system, that’s pretty much guaranteed.
But I believe she will stand against China and will not be a senile, chuntering old man obsessing over past slights and grievances while America burns. And that is far and away enough to get my support.
Weird that the Dems have become the patriotic party and the Repubs are ready to hand over the country to Putin. Never thought I’d see some shit like that.
But I’m on board for the Dems being pointed the right direction for once.
This is really revealing as to the so-called vibe shift of the last few months:
It’s going to end up being a bipolar world (America, China) at least partly because other countries insist on just voluntarily fucking themselves over. What Germany is doing is pure goddamn insanity.
Even though we have been kinda shit at it and in many ways doing it from a Machiavellian mindset, providing arms so that Ukraine doesn’t get overrun is the best thing the US has done in a long while. If we allow enough to permit Ukraine to win, it’ll be an insurance policy against 100,000 American deaths in Poland in 2030.
The harsh reality is that 99% of Americans don’t give a crap what’s happening in Gaza or Israel and it won’t have any effect on the election one way or another. Being a large geographically-isolated country makes the US very inward-facing.
Hardly anyone cares that Kamala supports Israel or doesn’t support Israel. I certainly don’t and I know more than most voters.
Harris to Call For ‘Price Gouging’ Ban on Food and Groceries.
This is just a poorly-worded attempt at anti-trust action, which is great. We need a lot more of that. These are not “price controls” in any traditional (or harmful) sense.
Harris, in her speech, will specifically single out the highly consolidated meat industry, deeming its processing middlemen “particularly egregious” price fixers with a history of being found to have illegally controlled prices.
She also plans to direct her administration to carefully scrutinize proposed mergers between large food companies with an emphasis on considering whether they will result in higher grocery prices for consumers
That’s exactly what the FTC and DOJ should be doing a whole lot more of. We need to get American trust enforcement back on track as illegal consolidation and related price fixing is causing unnecessarily high inflation. I support what she’s doing 100%, but not the speechwriter who put those words in her mouth. This statement also makes it more likely she’ll keep Lina Khan in place at the FTC, who is the best chair that org has had since the 1950s.
Kamala is a much better candidate than I thought she’d be, and actually has energy for campaigning and fundraising. This’ll be a good natural experiment to see how much that matters1, especially if the economy continues to hum along about the same as it is now.
I am glad that I was wrong about her capabilities and prospects.
