5 ms·

Exactly. That's where this is heading, and the West-- as usual-- is pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up.

echelon 10mo ago
Is anyone here calling legislators about it to inform them of this? Does anyone here have leverage to affect strategy?
- xmprt 10mo ago
  It might be a bit nihilistic but at this point I don't think the current US administration has any strategy. In past administrations, it felt like even if there was a strategy, bureaucracy and lack of caring enough to do their job led to nothing happening. In this administration, it feels like there's no care for the rules so in theory a strategy could be pushed through... except there isn't one - literally whoever is the last person to talk to the president is the person who gets to set the direction.
  - roadside_picnic 10mo ago
    > I don't think the current US administration has any strategy I 100% believe the strategy is to enlarge the Trump family's wealth, and it's been a wildly successful strategy (in the past year he's been able to create billions in wealth for his family [0]). At least this vaguely ties Trump's success to the success of the United States in a limited capacity. Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him, but it's clear all policy decisions being made are being done so based on their capacity to improve Trump's situation. We've been headed this direction long before Trump, from both parties, increasingly American policy is about what's good for American companies and in particular the people who own them. Now that pool has just shrunk a bit. 0. https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-family-business-visualized-6d132c71 https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-family-business-visualize...
    - defrost 10mo ago
      > Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him, Exactly, just as taking out structural supports when stripping copper and goods from a three story walkup is sub optimal and potentially fatal. But make no mistake, from way out here (Australia), having watched the US for decades, it really does look like you've a grifter inside the house taking everything that isn't nailed down with zero concern for anyone else in the US. It's a bad time for those that cannot afford shiny gold baubles.
    - tempest_ 10mo ago
      > Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him How can you say? The ultra wealthy are not playing team sports. If the country burned tomorrow they would just sit on their yacht or buy citizenship somewhere else. Sure the lion share of his investments are currently in the US, but that could easily change.
      - roadside_picnic 10mo ago
        Most cynically? I sincerely believe there's more value he can extract from American workers if he can keep the ride going on just a bit longer. For example: it's better to keep the stock market a float a volatile so he can transfer a bit more wealth from the American people before it does eventually break down. Yes, they'll all be on yachts when the shit hits the fan, but they're still fighting to figure out who get the biggest yacht, and right now it seems like Trump has more to milk from us before he entirely lets this thing fall apart.
        immibis 10mo ago
        He also has dementia so he probably can't plan that far ahead. He's operating on a very short term feedback cycle: this reporter asked me a question that makes me look bad, so I call her piggy. That's the timescale we're operating on. Not even quarterly profits but moment-to-moment.
    - NicoJuicy 10mo ago
      > Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him Nah. He wants to be a dictator that extracts wealth from it's citizens. He has a benefit from following the communist path to extract wealth. Make lives miserable, so they are living off the state ( eg. standing in line for bread), so they can't protest. Putin is not Trump's friend, but Trump idolises him for extracting enormous wealth from Russia, censoring news ( propaganda) and imprisoning political opponents, ... Just check the "firehose of falsehoods" ( a Russian propaganda method), it will explain a lot about Trump.
  - scottyah 10mo ago
    I think it's the same problem as the past administration and most members of congress- they're just too old to care about 50yrs from now. I don't think they're actively against the 50yr+ future, it's just that the world is changing too fast, and they're falling back to what they know- competing with their peers for power, money, and status. They only have some inkling of actual empathy for the communities their grandkids are in at a personal level, and just have the "throw money at it" mentality for the bigger issues like healthcare, since that has been their MO for the last couple decades. Instead of taking leadership positions and driving change, they seem to just want to squabble and create fiefdoms and have others do the work.
    - afavour 10mo ago
      I do think the current administration is still a step down from the (not particularly great) last, though. Congress has essentially given up their authority on everything so any movement must come from the top… and the top has an extremely small attention span.
    - smallmancontrov 10mo ago
      > same problem as the past administration Did you miss the Infrastructure act that spent $500B on roads, ports, and water projects? The CHIPS act that spent $50B on decoupling and R&D?! The Climate & Energy act ("IRA") that spent $400B on clean energy subsidies??!! I can understand the perspective of wanting more, but the forward-looking policies of the last administration were in a different galaxy compared to those of the current administration, where the big plan is to chop USAID, boost deportations, and cut capital gains tax. This is the difference between corn and the cob and corn in the toilet. No, it is not the same.
      - terminalshort 10mo ago
        The problem is that China could have built the same infrastructure for $100B and in 25% of the time. Pumping subsidies into our bloated bureaucratic nightmare of a system is only going to make the lawyers and bureaucrats who are its gatekeepers fatter.
      - 10mo ago
  - reincarnate0x14 10mo ago
    Without getting overly political, it is nihilistic because one of the major US parties got so high on its own supply of lies that the people currently running it FORGOT they were lying. You're looking at a similar situation to many authoritarian or fascist political systems in which they way to get ahead in no way involves doing your job, but making sure Stalin or Mussolini is happy with you. This started in the US in the mid 1990s when GOP leadership bought in on power being its own end and is now on full display. People have all sorts of mythologized reasons for why the USSR failed, because while it often produced immense amounts of goods and services and well educated people in certain areas (sometimes beating "the west" by a good margin for one or two years at a go), it also made long term advancement contingent on the party and not the real world and became incapable of handling major changes. We're witnessing that now in the US with perhaps one of the most incompetent governments in history that is also burning down the non-political institutions of expertise that for all their faults and mistakes, at least had educated and motivated people that cared about their purpose.
  - terminalshort 10mo ago
    Exactly right. Democrats have the desire to do big things, but not the capability. Republicans have the capability, but no desire.
    - immibis 10mo ago
      It's more accurate to say everyone who wants to do the right thing is a Democrat, than to say all Democrats want to do the right thing. Most of them are just the lite version of Republicans.
  - csomar 10mo ago
    Current US strategy is to get South America+Canada resources and call it a day. They looked at global geopolitics and it looked too complicated for them.
- kelipso 10mo ago
  > calling legislators Good joke. Probably a couple of tech billionaires will eventually say something and then something will happen.
- sixQuarks 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - aidenn0 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  - idiotsecant 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - YY348273984732 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      - idiotsecant 10mo ago
        If you expect people to engage with you in a way that requires effort from them, the least you could do is not use a burner account.
      - lern_too_spel 10mo ago
        GP was talking about where he'd rather hang out between the U.S. and China. Gaza wasn't in the running.
- Barrin92 10mo ago
  this is one of those 'elections matter' cases. There's no strategy. Americans made it clear they want a country run by real estate crooks, crypto bros, gambling advocates and bizarre entertainment personalities. A country sized Las Vegas maybe and the beauty is the people get always what they deserve.
  - Avicebron 10mo ago
    Or, to play Devil's advocate, people called in the rabid dog because they felt they had been sold down the river starting in the 1970s. The hollowed out industrial towns weren't good places to grow up, and when they did manage to go to college and play by the rules the ladders were already in a fast retreat up the walls.. Damned if you. Damned if you don't.
    - Renaud 10mo ago
      And their mistake lies in believing that populist rhetoric is going to make their lives better…
      - deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
    - 1over137 10mo ago
      In fact I think both you and the parent are right simultaneously.
- marbro 10mo ago
  [dead]
- crote 10mo ago
  Oh, they know. The industry has been lobbying quite badly for exactly this to happen. Why spend a fortune on innovation when a few bucks of lobbying can get the government to ban your competition because "China bad"? As the comment you responded to said: it's all about the next quarterly profits. The fact that we are getting leapfrogged by China doesn't matter to those CEOs: that's a long-term thing, and it doesn't impact their next bonus.
- roarcher 10mo ago
  Call me a cynic, but legislators own stock in these companies. Their true interest in them is also "line go up".
- dboreham 10mo ago
  Legislators aren't interested in actual expertise. They only need to know what each constituency wants and how much money they have.
tokioyoyo 10mo ago
To be very fair, Chinese companies are also pursing quarterly profits. They're just better at scaling things up and down very fast because of immense supply chain options.
- chii 10mo ago
  > immense supply chain options. so this begs the question - why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense? My unresearched answer is that the gov't policies of the west doesn't induce it, while china's gov't does (which includes targeted subsidies, tax incentives and state driven finances). The "hidden" cost is that the workers in this supply chain isn't as well paid and isn't as powerful as the workers from the west (there's no unions in china for example).
  - solid_fuel 10mo ago
    > why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense? They used to be. Since roughly the 80's, policymakers have decided it is better for the shareholders to outsource most of that industry overseas to China and India and etc, where the labor is cheaper. Note that workers and especially union members actually have every incentive to keep that production domestic, but shareholders and CEOs profit when they can cut labor costs and the typical Western consumer values cheap products more than the health of domestic industry. Western industries have been supported by subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, low interest rates, and a dozen other things from the gov't but the same policies reward outsourcing and financial engineering more than actual production capacity.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  - smallmancontrov 10mo ago
    The beneficial owners of the US economy sold our industrial manufacturing base to the Communist Party of China because the price was good. China got our hard power and US capital owners got to break the back of the US labor movement. A win-win deal for the ages.
mr_toad 10mo ago
> West-- as usual-- is pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up. The companies building out vast data centers for AI aren’t looking to make profits for several years (if ever), and are catching a lot of flak for it. The shareholders who seem to be focused on short-term profits and punish them every time they get cold feet. Oracle is a prime example of this. I don’t know if the markets in Asia work differently, or if the investors there are just as fickle.
- kiba 10mo ago
  And they should be catching a lot of flak for it because it's not really long term strategic planning, it's overhyping a technology and running roughshod over society promoting misuses and AI slops.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - vouwfietsman 10mo ago
    Although I'm the first to agree with this, it is actually commendable in the sense that it breaks with the quarterly profits approach. Like meta with the metaverse thing, I hate it with a passion, but pouring billions yearly with little return just to support your vision is at least a break with tradition...
GolfPopper 10mo ago
>pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up "Forgetting to look up" implies a desire or intent to do so. The United States - former leader of the collective West - made the choice decades ago to sacrifice everything on the altar of quarterly profits. All that remains are the consequences of that decision.
- pogue 10mo ago
  When did this whole quarterly profits thing start and what lead to it?
  - cjbgkagh 10mo ago
    Minority shareholder rights, you can be sued for not maximizing profits see Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. (1919).
  - jaggederest 10mo ago
    You can round it down to Milton Friedman as the ideology and Jack Welch at GE in the 80s as the implementation and figurehead, but the original seeds were in the SEC mandating quarterly reporting as part of regulation after the great depression. We can all agree to blame Jack Welch as shorthand though, I think.
    - irishcoffee 10mo ago
      I think it changed before that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
  - terminalshort 10mo ago
    It's not real. Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth. But for some reason people love to use this as an explanation of everything wrong in our country.
    - jaggederest 10mo ago

echelon 10mo ago

Is anyone here calling legislators about it to inform them of this? Does anyone here have leverage to affect strategy?

xmprt 10mo ago
It might be a bit nihilistic but at this point I don't think the current US administration has any strategy. In past administrations, it felt like even if there was a strategy, bureaucracy and lack of caring enough to do their job led to nothing happening. In this administration, it feels like there's no care for the rules so in theory a strategy could be pushed through... except there isn't one - literally whoever is the last person to talk to the president is the person who gets to set the direction.
- roadside_picnic 10mo ago
  > I don't think the current US administration has any strategy I 100% believe the strategy is to enlarge the Trump family's wealth, and it's been a wildly successful strategy (in the past year he's been able to create billions in wealth for his family [0]). At least this vaguely ties Trump's success to the success of the United States in a limited capacity. Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him, but it's clear all policy decisions being made are being done so based on their capacity to improve Trump's situation. We've been headed this direction long before Trump, from both parties, increasingly American policy is about what's good for American companies and in particular the people who own them. Now that pool has just shrunk a bit. 0. https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-family-business-visualized-6d132c71 https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-family-business-visualize...
  - defrost 10mo ago
    > Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him, Exactly, just as taking out structural supports when stripping copper and goods from a three story walkup is sub optimal and potentially fatal. But make no mistake, from way out here (Australia), having watched the US for decades, it really does look like you've a grifter inside the house taking everything that isn't nailed down with zero concern for anyone else in the US. It's a bad time for those that cannot afford shiny gold baubles.
  - tempest_ 10mo ago
    > Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him How can you say? The ultra wealthy are not playing team sports. If the country burned tomorrow they would just sit on their yacht or buy citizenship somewhere else. Sure the lion share of his investments are currently in the US, but that could easily change.
    - roadside_picnic 10mo ago
      Most cynically? I sincerely believe there's more value he can extract from American workers if he can keep the ride going on just a bit longer. For example: it's better to keep the stock market a float a volatile so he can transfer a bit more wealth from the American people before it does eventually break down. Yes, they'll all be on yachts when the shit hits the fan, but they're still fighting to figure out who get the biggest yacht, and right now it seems like Trump has more to milk from us before he entirely lets this thing fall apart.
      - immibis 10mo ago
        He also has dementia so he probably can't plan that far ahead. He's operating on a very short term feedback cycle: this reporter asked me a question that makes me look bad, so I call her piggy. That's the timescale we're operating on. Not even quarterly profits but moment-to-moment.
  - NicoJuicy 10mo ago
    > Completely destroying the US is not ideal for him Nah. He wants to be a dictator that extracts wealth from it's citizens. He has a benefit from following the communist path to extract wealth. Make lives miserable, so they are living off the state ( eg. standing in line for bread), so they can't protest. Putin is not Trump's friend, but Trump idolises him for extracting enormous wealth from Russia, censoring news ( propaganda) and imprisoning political opponents, ... Just check the "firehose of falsehoods" ( a Russian propaganda method), it will explain a lot about Trump.
- scottyah 10mo ago
  I think it's the same problem as the past administration and most members of congress- they're just too old to care about 50yrs from now. I don't think they're actively against the 50yr+ future, it's just that the world is changing too fast, and they're falling back to what they know- competing with their peers for power, money, and status. They only have some inkling of actual empathy for the communities their grandkids are in at a personal level, and just have the "throw money at it" mentality for the bigger issues like healthcare, since that has been their MO for the last couple decades. Instead of taking leadership positions and driving change, they seem to just want to squabble and create fiefdoms and have others do the work.
  - afavour 10mo ago
    I do think the current administration is still a step down from the (not particularly great) last, though. Congress has essentially given up their authority on everything so any movement must come from the top… and the top has an extremely small attention span.
  - smallmancontrov 10mo ago
    > same problem as the past administration Did you miss the Infrastructure act that spent $500B on roads, ports, and water projects? The CHIPS act that spent $50B on decoupling and R&D?! The Climate & Energy act ("IRA") that spent $400B on clean energy subsidies??!! I can understand the perspective of wanting more, but the forward-looking policies of the last administration were in a different galaxy compared to those of the current administration, where the big plan is to chop USAID, boost deportations, and cut capital gains tax. This is the difference between corn and the cob and corn in the toilet. No, it is not the same.
    - terminalshort 10mo ago
      The problem is that China could have built the same infrastructure for $100B and in 25% of the time. Pumping subsidies into our bloated bureaucratic nightmare of a system is only going to make the lawyers and bureaucrats who are its gatekeepers fatter.
    - 10mo ago
- reincarnate0x14 10mo ago
  Without getting overly political, it is nihilistic because one of the major US parties got so high on its own supply of lies that the people currently running it FORGOT they were lying. You're looking at a similar situation to many authoritarian or fascist political systems in which they way to get ahead in no way involves doing your job, but making sure Stalin or Mussolini is happy with you. This started in the US in the mid 1990s when GOP leadership bought in on power being its own end and is now on full display. People have all sorts of mythologized reasons for why the USSR failed, because while it often produced immense amounts of goods and services and well educated people in certain areas (sometimes beating "the west" by a good margin for one or two years at a go), it also made long term advancement contingent on the party and not the real world and became incapable of handling major changes. We're witnessing that now in the US with perhaps one of the most incompetent governments in history that is also burning down the non-political institutions of expertise that for all their faults and mistakes, at least had educated and motivated people that cared about their purpose.
- terminalshort 10mo ago
  Exactly right. Democrats have the desire to do big things, but not the capability. Republicans have the capability, but no desire.
  - immibis 10mo ago
    It's more accurate to say everyone who wants to do the right thing is a Democrat, than to say all Democrats want to do the right thing. Most of them are just the lite version of Republicans.
- csomar 10mo ago
  Current US strategy is to get South America+Canada resources and call it a day. They looked at global geopolitics and it looked too complicated for them.
kelipso 10mo ago
> calling legislators Good joke. Probably a couple of tech billionaires will eventually say something and then something will happen.
sixQuarks 10mo ago
[flagged]
- aidenn0 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- idiotsecant 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - YY348273984732 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - idiotsecant 10mo ago
      If you expect people to engage with you in a way that requires effort from them, the least you could do is not use a burner account.
    - lern_too_spel 10mo ago
      GP was talking about where he'd rather hang out between the U.S. and China. Gaza wasn't in the running.
Barrin92 10mo ago
this is one of those 'elections matter' cases. There's no strategy. Americans made it clear they want a country run by real estate crooks, crypto bros, gambling advocates and bizarre entertainment personalities. A country sized Las Vegas maybe and the beauty is the people get always what they deserve.
- Avicebron 10mo ago
  Or, to play Devil's advocate, people called in the rabid dog because they felt they had been sold down the river starting in the 1970s. The hollowed out industrial towns weren't good places to grow up, and when they did manage to go to college and play by the rules the ladders were already in a fast retreat up the walls.. Damned if you. Damned if you don't.
  - Renaud 10mo ago
    And their mistake lies in believing that populist rhetoric is going to make their lives better…
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  - 1over137 10mo ago
    In fact I think both you and the parent are right simultaneously.
marbro 10mo ago
[dead]
crote 10mo ago
Oh, they know. The industry has been lobbying quite badly for exactly this to happen. Why spend a fortune on innovation when a few bucks of lobbying can get the government to ban your competition because "China bad"? As the comment you responded to said: it's all about the next quarterly profits. The fact that we are getting leapfrogged by China doesn't matter to those CEOs: that's a long-term thing, and it doesn't impact their next bonus.
roarcher 10mo ago
Call me a cynic, but legislators own stock in these companies. Their true interest in them is also "line go up".
dboreham 10mo ago
Legislators aren't interested in actual expertise. They only need to know what each constituency wants and how much money they have.

tokioyoyo 10mo ago

To be very fair, Chinese companies are also pursing quarterly profits. They're just better at scaling things up and down very fast because of immense supply chain options.

chii 10mo ago
> immense supply chain options. so this begs the question - why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense? My unresearched answer is that the gov't policies of the west doesn't induce it, while china's gov't does (which includes targeted subsidies, tax incentives and state driven finances). The "hidden" cost is that the workers in this supply chain isn't as well paid and isn't as powerful as the workers from the west (there's no unions in china for example).
- solid_fuel 10mo ago
  > why isn't the west's own supply chain options as immense? They used to be. Since roughly the 80's, policymakers have decided it is better for the shareholders to outsource most of that industry overseas to China and India and etc, where the labor is cheaper. Note that workers and especially union members actually have every incentive to keep that production domestic, but shareholders and CEOs profit when they can cut labor costs and the typical Western consumer values cheap products more than the health of domestic industry. Western industries have been supported by subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, low interest rates, and a dozen other things from the gov't but the same policies reward outsourcing and financial engineering more than actual production capacity.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- smallmancontrov 10mo ago
  The beneficial owners of the US economy sold our industrial manufacturing base to the Communist Party of China because the price was good. China got our hard power and US capital owners got to break the back of the US labor movement. A win-win deal for the ages.

mr_toad 10mo ago

> West-- as usual-- is pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up. The companies building out vast data centers for AI aren’t looking to make profits for several years (if ever), and are catching a lot of flak for it. The shareholders who seem to be focused on short-term profits and punish them every time they get cold feet. Oracle is a prime example of this. I don’t know if the markets in Asia work differently, or if the investors there are just as fickle.

kiba 10mo ago
And they should be catching a lot of flak for it because it's not really long term strategic planning, it's overhyping a technology and running roughshod over society promoting misuses and AI slops.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- vouwfietsman 10mo ago
  Although I'm the first to agree with this, it is actually commendable in the sense that it breaks with the quarterly profits approach. Like meta with the metaverse thing, I hate it with a passion, but pouring billions yearly with little return just to support your vision is at least a break with tradition...

GolfPopper 10mo ago

>pursuing quarterly profits and forgetting to look up "Forgetting to look up" implies a desire or intent to do so. The United States - former leader of the collective West - made the choice decades ago to sacrifice everything on the altar of quarterly profits. All that remains are the consequences of that decision.

pogue 10mo ago
When did this whole quarterly profits thing start and what lead to it?
- cjbgkagh 10mo ago
  Minority shareholder rights, you can be sued for not maximizing profits see Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. (1919).
- jaggederest 10mo ago
  You can round it down to Milton Friedman as the ideology and Jack Welch at GE in the 80s as the implementation and figurehead, but the original seeds were in the SEC mandating quarterly reporting as part of regulation after the great depression. We can all agree to blame Jack Welch as shorthand though, I think.
  - irishcoffee 10mo ago
    I think it changed before that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
- terminalshort 10mo ago
  It's not real. Companies routinely lose money for years in pursuit of long term growth. But for some reason people love to use this as an explanation of everything wrong in our country.
  - jaggederest 10mo ago