5 ms·

Why is this not simply disqualifying?

localghost3000 2y ago
Because nothing matters. Just wait out the outrage cycle. In a week or two the general public will have moved on. Signalgate, the president being convicted of numerous felonies, etc being a few examples that pop into my head. None of this should be status quo but we live in interesting times as they say.
- dummydummy1234 2y ago
  Maybe, but it is a lot harder to 'move on' when your retirement is down 20+% One can have the naive hope that people will start to care about competency. Of course, we also have covid with estimated 1M Excess deaths... So, probably not.
  - Jtsummers 2y ago
    https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/list/all?strategy=all_in_one https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/list/all?s... Vanguard's lifecycle funds (picking them because they get promoted a lot as a good choice, courtesy of good marketing and lower fees and generally good returns). Their 2030 fund, the one that people are recommended to select if they're retiring around 2028-2032, is down 4.54% YTD, and down 1.42% for the last year. The current market effects have wiped out over a year in gains for a relatively conservative fund. And that's all from the last two trading days, it was slightly up YTD on Wednesday. And all of this is before the effects of the tariffs come into play. We haven't actually seen the effect of higher import costs hitting companies and consumers yet. So people approaching retirement are getting hit and hit hard, but it's not quite 20% for them unless they selected an aggressive investment strategy for some reason. The worst for the Vanguard funds are down about 8% YTD (and likely to get worse) for anyone 25 years or more away from retirement.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      Wiping out a year's of gains is significant if you're already retired and counting on steady gains to provide income to live on.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - YZF 2y ago
        Nobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income. The stock market goes up and it goes down. In both the dot com crash and the 2008 financial crisis the market fell significantly more. Even in Covid it fell more. So you should plan for many of these events to happen within your retirement. If you're more conservative (pun?) you should plan for great depression style events within your retirement. EDIT: I don't usually respond to downvotes but it's really important to understand the stock market is a volatile investment. You shouldn't have money you're planning to use in the short or medium term in the stock market. It's a longer term (10 years+) investment.
        bananalychee 2y ago
        As much as HN posters like to pretend they're above them, it's not an exaggeration to say that this site is now about as political as Reddit or Bluesky and votes like them. Depending on the thread, your comments will be downgraded for lack of left-wing partisanship, not because you're wrong or because your post is low-quality. For the record, my vote seems to have removed the low-opacity threshold on your post. I have no doubt that countless intelligent posts have been hidden solely because they do not align with leftist consensus, and comment sections are full of entirely delusional subthreads that fail to comprehend just about anything about politics, economics, or ethics, but are promoted because they align with a simplistic radical framework of "good guys smart, bad guys dumb".
        croes 2y ago
        >Nobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income. >your comments will be downgraded for lack of left-wing The comment is kind of left leaning so I doubt that’s the reason for the down votes
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  It's starting to matter. Trump's downfall will be his base seeing him as anything but a successful, smart businessman. He's struggling to control the narrative with how many gaffs and scandals have occurred, and it's starting to hit his base and his brand: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-update-polls-2055281 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-update... The tariffs are probably going to be a historical "turn of the tide" moment.
  - brookst 2y ago
    It’s definitely a test of whether we’ve got a political problem or a cult problem. I’m not as optimistic as you.
    - bnjms 2y ago
      A cult problem. But cult problems can be solved too. Trumpism might be cult-lite but it’s not something people cannot be led to see as harmful. Find what hooked them. Show that the outcome isn’t as Trump implied. Frame the failure as intentional rather than unintentional — Trumps usual approach to avoiding responsibility. Allow them to save face.
      - toomuchtodo 2y ago
        The cult also evaporates at the leader’s passing, and we all pass eventually.
        bediger4000 2y ago
        Kim Jung Un is the grandson of Kim Il Sung. Not all cults evaporate at the founder's death.
        rsynnott 2y ago
        That doesn’t seem particularly likely in Trump’s case, though; it’s hard to see his kids being compelling.
rexpop 2y ago
"Lighten up and have fun," he says at the end. For what will we actually hold him accountable? It's a smoking gun that he's a bullshitter, but it's not a crime to be a racist.
- galaxyLogic 2y ago
  Right, but it is in large part because of Navarro that Trump thinks universal tarifss are a great idea, since Navarro advocated for them and created credibility for his theories by inventing this fictional "expert". It gave Trump plausible deniability, he can claim he's just doing what great experts from the academia are advocating. And it gave us the market-crash and global trade-war. It's easy for billionaires to lighten up and have fun, but not for most other people. Tariffs are a sales-tax, which means poor people have to relinguish a larger proportion of their income to the government, than rich people. It is great wealth transfer from ordinary people to the rich. And one can only conjecture that THAT is why Trump and Navarro advocate for it.
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    > And one can only conjecture that THAT is why Trump and Navarro advocate for it. I'd guess: Navarro yes; Trump, no. In his case, it's just stupidity.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  > but it's not a crime to be a racist. That's the problem: It should be, if not legally, at least in terms of electability. But with enough of a proportion of racists in the electorate, it's no wonder racists get elected. Good bye and godspeed, America; it was nice knowing you.
  - rexpop 1y ago
    > it was nice knowing you. Not sure you ever "knew" America if you think this is the first time racists were ever elected.
    - 1y ago
kubb 2y ago
There’s a deeply rooted assumption that both sides are equivalent. This allows one of the sides to do whatever without its validity being disqualified, because any doubt is simply overridden by the assumption.
Cheer2171 2y ago
It is, but qualifications no longer matter. In fact, they are now seen as liabilities by the current regime.
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  To quote from previous Polish govt - "we do not hire experts, because when we hired experts they did not want to implement our program"
  - Jtsummers 2y ago
    I'm unfamiliar with Polish politics, and a quote like that does not surprise me coming from politicians (see "alternative facts" in the first Trump administration to excuse outright lies), but do you have a source for that or at least a source for what you're paraphrasing if it's not a direct quote?
    - StefanBatory 2y ago
      It's this - it was from vice spokesman of PiS, Jarosław Fogiel. https://x.com/bezprawnik/status/1303967275373015043 https://x.com/bezprawnik/status/1303967275373015043 EDIT: Wait a second, I need to check something. EDIT 2: Huh, I think I fell for this the entire time. It's "Z podobnym problemem mierzyliśmy się, kiedy sprawowaliśmy władzę w latach 2005-2007. Wtedy poszliśmy w kierunku bardzo eksperckim, właśnie otwartych konkursów jeśli chodzi o rady nadzorcze. Trafiali tam eksperci z rynku, trafiały osoby z tytułami naukowymi, z SGH, z innych uczelni. No i problem okazał się taki, że ich sposób myślenia o gospodarce, o zarządzaniu był zupełnie sprzeczny z tym, co Prawo i Sprawiedliwość ma w swoim programie." Which translates to "We faced a similar problem when we were in power in 2005-2007. Then we went in a very expert direction, precisely open competitions when it came to supervisory boards. Experts from the market ended up there, people with academic degrees, from the Warsaw School of Economics, from other universities. Well, and the problem turned out to be that their way of thinking about the economy, about management was completely contrary to what Law and Justice has in its program." ... so that quote was from editiorial summarising it, not that person himself.
stevenwoo 2y ago
Three members from of the cabinet have one or more sexual assault or rape accusations and the president can no longer claim he did not rape Jean in public without committing defamation. And Trump got re elected and only a token handful of GOP senators voted against any of those cabinet nominees. Consequences only matter if one is not in the clique.
belter 2y ago
Because you live in the age of cognitive dissonance: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4JkA8555hnM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4JkA8555hnM
georgemcbay 2y ago
All that matters for his continued employment as an adviser is Trump's opinion of him. This behavior is not likely to be seen as a negative by Trump, but rather as a positive "go-getter" trait. Trump has employed this method of inventing people to talk himself up for many decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonyms_used_by_Donald_Trump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonyms_used_by_Donald_Trum... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsYKRUE_D5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsYKRUE_D5g https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/audio-from-may-17-1984-phone-conversation/2018/04/20/bab5f61e-4429-11e8-b2dc-b0a403e4720a_video.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/audio-from-may... Its actually reasonable to believe that Navarro may have got the idea from Trump whether directly or indirectly.
jredwards 2y ago
Trump has long done the same thing. His alter ego was John Baron.
tim333 2y ago
It's really just a literary device in some books he wrote. Navarro's actual ideas being a little crackpot is more of an issue.

Because nothing matters. Just wait out the outrage cycle. In a week or two the general public will have moved on. Signalgate, the president being convicted of numerous felonies, etc being a few examples that pop into my head. None of this should be status quo but we live in interesting times as they say.

dummydummy1234 2y ago
Maybe, but it is a lot harder to 'move on' when your retirement is down 20+% One can have the naive hope that people will start to care about competency. Of course, we also have covid with estimated 1M Excess deaths... So, probably not.
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/list/all?strategy=all_in_one https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/list/all?s... Vanguard's lifecycle funds (picking them because they get promoted a lot as a good choice, courtesy of good marketing and lower fees and generally good returns). Their 2030 fund, the one that people are recommended to select if they're retiring around 2028-2032, is down 4.54% YTD, and down 1.42% for the last year. The current market effects have wiped out over a year in gains for a relatively conservative fund. And that's all from the last two trading days, it was slightly up YTD on Wednesday. And all of this is before the effects of the tariffs come into play. We haven't actually seen the effect of higher import costs hitting companies and consumers yet. So people approaching retirement are getting hit and hit hard, but it's not quite 20% for them unless they selected an aggressive investment strategy for some reason. The worst for the Vanguard funds are down about 8% YTD (and likely to get worse) for anyone 25 years or more away from retirement.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Wiping out a year's of gains is significant if you're already retired and counting on steady gains to provide income to live on.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - YZF 2y ago
      Nobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income. The stock market goes up and it goes down. In both the dot com crash and the 2008 financial crisis the market fell significantly more. Even in Covid it fell more. So you should plan for many of these events to happen within your retirement. If you're more conservative (pun?) you should plan for great depression style events within your retirement. EDIT: I don't usually respond to downvotes but it's really important to understand the stock market is a volatile investment. You shouldn't have money you're planning to use in the short or medium term in the stock market. It's a longer term (10 years+) investment.
      - bananalychee 2y ago
        As much as HN posters like to pretend they're above them, it's not an exaggeration to say that this site is now about as political as Reddit or Bluesky and votes like them. Depending on the thread, your comments will be downgraded for lack of left-wing partisanship, not because you're wrong or because your post is low-quality. For the record, my vote seems to have removed the low-opacity threshold on your post. I have no doubt that countless intelligent posts have been hidden solely because they do not align with leftist consensus, and comment sections are full of entirely delusional subthreads that fail to comprehend just about anything about politics, economics, or ethics, but are promoted because they align with a simplistic radical framework of "good guys smart, bad guys dumb".
        croes 2y ago
        >Nobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income. >your comments will be downgraded for lack of left-wing The comment is kind of left leaning so I doubt that’s the reason for the down votes
candiddevmike 2y ago
It's starting to matter. Trump's downfall will be his base seeing him as anything but a successful, smart businessman. He's struggling to control the narrative with how many gaffs and scandals have occurred, and it's starting to hit his base and his brand: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-update-polls-2055281 https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-update... The tariffs are probably going to be a historical "turn of the tide" moment.
- brookst 2y ago
  It’s definitely a test of whether we’ve got a political problem or a cult problem. I’m not as optimistic as you.
  - bnjms 2y ago
    A cult problem. But cult problems can be solved too. Trumpism might be cult-lite but it’s not something people cannot be led to see as harmful. Find what hooked them. Show that the outcome isn’t as Trump implied. Frame the failure as intentional rather than unintentional — Trumps usual approach to avoiding responsibility. Allow them to save face.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      The cult also evaporates at the leader’s passing, and we all pass eventually.
      - bediger4000 2y ago
        Kim Jung Un is the grandson of Kim Il Sung. Not all cults evaporate at the founder's death.
        rsynnott 2y ago
        That doesn’t seem particularly likely in Trump’s case, though; it’s hard to see his kids being compelling.

rexpop 2y ago

"Lighten up and have fun," he says at the end. For what will we actually hold him accountable? It's a smoking gun that he's a bullshitter, but it's not a crime to be a racist.

galaxyLogic 2y ago
Right, but it is in large part because of Navarro that Trump thinks universal tarifss are a great idea, since Navarro advocated for them and created credibility for his theories by inventing this fictional "expert". It gave Trump plausible deniability, he can claim he's just doing what great experts from the academia are advocating. And it gave us the market-crash and global trade-war. It's easy for billionaires to lighten up and have fun, but not for most other people. Tariffs are a sales-tax, which means poor people have to relinguish a larger proportion of their income to the government, than rich people. It is great wealth transfer from ordinary people to the rich. And one can only conjecture that THAT is why Trump and Navarro advocate for it.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  > And one can only conjecture that THAT is why Trump and Navarro advocate for it. I'd guess: Navarro yes; Trump, no. In his case, it's just stupidity.
CRConrad 2y ago
> but it's not a crime to be a racist. That's the problem: It should be, if not legally, at least in terms of electability. But with enough of a proportion of racists in the electorate, it's no wonder racists get elected. Good bye and godspeed, America; it was nice knowing you.
- rexpop 1y ago
  > it was nice knowing you. Not sure you ever "knew" America if you think this is the first time racists were ever elected.
  - 1y ago

kubb 2y ago

There’s a deeply rooted assumption that both sides are equivalent. This allows one of the sides to do whatever without its validity being disqualified, because any doubt is simply overridden by the assumption.

Cheer2171 2y ago

It is, but qualifications no longer matter. In fact, they are now seen as liabilities by the current regime.

StefanBatory 2y ago
To quote from previous Polish govt - "we do not hire experts, because when we hired experts they did not want to implement our program"
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  I'm unfamiliar with Polish politics, and a quote like that does not surprise me coming from politicians (see "alternative facts" in the first Trump administration to excuse outright lies), but do you have a source for that or at least a source for what you're paraphrasing if it's not a direct quote?
  - StefanBatory 2y ago
    It's this - it was from vice spokesman of PiS, Jarosław Fogiel. https://x.com/bezprawnik/status/1303967275373015043 https://x.com/bezprawnik/status/1303967275373015043 EDIT: Wait a second, I need to check something. EDIT 2: Huh, I think I fell for this the entire time. It's "Z podobnym problemem mierzyliśmy się, kiedy sprawowaliśmy władzę w latach 2005-2007. Wtedy poszliśmy w kierunku bardzo eksperckim, właśnie otwartych konkursów jeśli chodzi o rady nadzorcze. Trafiali tam eksperci z rynku, trafiały osoby z tytułami naukowymi, z SGH, z innych uczelni. No i problem okazał się taki, że ich sposób myślenia o gospodarce, o zarządzaniu był zupełnie sprzeczny z tym, co Prawo i Sprawiedliwość ma w swoim programie." Which translates to "We faced a similar problem when we were in power in 2005-2007. Then we went in a very expert direction, precisely open competitions when it came to supervisory boards. Experts from the market ended up there, people with academic degrees, from the Warsaw School of Economics, from other universities. Well, and the problem turned out to be that their way of thinking about the economy, about management was completely contrary to what Law and Justice has in its program." ... so that quote was from editiorial summarising it, not that person himself.

stevenwoo 2y ago

Three members from of the cabinet have one or more sexual assault or rape accusations and the president can no longer claim he did not rape Jean in public without committing defamation. And Trump got re elected and only a token handful of GOP senators voted against any of those cabinet nominees. Consequences only matter if one is not in the clique.

belter 2y ago

Because you live in the age of cognitive dissonance: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4JkA8555hnM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4JkA8555hnM

georgemcbay 2y ago

All that matters for his continued employment as an adviser is Trump's opinion of him. This behavior is not likely to be seen as a negative by Trump, but rather as a positive "go-getter" trait. Trump has employed this method of inventing people to talk himself up for many decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonyms_used_by_Donald_Trump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonyms_used_by_Donald_Trum... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsYKRUE_D5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsYKRUE_D5g https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/audio-from-may-17-1984-phone-conversation/2018/04/20/bab5f61e-4429-11e8-b2dc-b0a403e4720a_video.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/audio-from-may... Its actually reasonable to believe that Navarro may have got the idea from Trump whether directly or indirectly.

jredwards 2y ago

Trump has long done the same thing. His alter ego was John Baron.

tim333 2y ago

It's really just a literary device in some books he wrote. Navarro's actual ideas being a little crackpot is more of an issue.