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Insider trading as a service. No one is going to take the US seriously for the next 50 years.

Waterluvian 2mo ago
Or possibly ever again. Eras like this one can be what kills an empire/great power. I think one of the greater risks to a power like the U.S. is getting old enough where it's felt like things always were, and therefore always will be. When there is no-longer a grandparent at the dinner table who can even tell you when his grandparent at the dinner table spoke about the before times.
- rubyfan 2mo ago
  Right, the fact that the current administration had a 4 year hiatus only extended this period. Think about all the young people that grew up with this as normal.
  - reactordev 2mo ago
    Reinforced by the Parnas', Lambert's, Kirk's and Loomer's on TikTok. Ready to vote in the next midterms. Thinking 9/11 was an inside job...
  - flossly 2mo ago
    Sorry, as an outsider, I think it has been a clown show for much longer. The whole Hunter corruption scandal in Ukraine + the laptop made it quite clear to me back then. And I can go on.
    - blini-kot 2mo ago
      yep, they have a hard time grasping the fact that its been the same for the past 40-60 years the only exception now is not the corrupt administration, but the one being the most inept and blatant at being corrupt as opposed to its predecessors
      - salemh 2mo ago
        [dead]
      - flossly 2mo ago
        There's a Trump hate raging, but, as you also have seen: it's nothing new. Just the crazy partisanism that's going on in the states blinds people to the fact that they are not ruled by one part of the other, but that the parties are the smoke and mirrors of the non-democratic, unelected, unaccountable, unseen actual govt.
        blini-kot 2mo ago
        exactly, yep
    - saulapremium 2mo ago
      The Hunter corruption scandal is to the current administration as a drop of water is to a swimming pool. But I have no doubt that you can go on.
    - no-name-here 2mo ago
      What do you believe happened re: Ukraine? What was the absolute worst thing from the laptop? Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira... Hunter Biden laptop controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers... 2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Trump%E2%80%93Ukraine_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Trump%E2%80%93Ukraine_sca...
    - gopher_space 2mo ago
      Quite clear that people don't understand the basics of forensics. Watching people ruin their professional reputation over something they desperately want to believe in was quite the education.
  - ben_w 2mo ago
    Grandparents telling about their grandparents is a very different timescale than two presidential terms with a gap of just one between them. The "what changed in the 1970s?" meme graphs are the kinds of timescale for forgetting what is and isn't "normal" for your grandparents, and the Great Depression for your grandparents' grandparents. Eternal growth? Nah. Even the worst of times will be shortly followed by a recovery, soon enough you survive on savings? Pft. The President surely wouldn't consider to order the removal of protesting veterans, with the Army Chief of Staff implementing this order with a contingent of infantry and cavalry, supported by six tanks, burning the belongings that the veterans had left behind after being cleared from where they had been protesting? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army Conscription? Concentration camps? These are also in the "grandparents' grandparents" timescale in the USA. Go back only a one more generation and you get lynching *postcards*.
  - browningstreet 2mo ago
    I remember tales of how backwards and corrupt the Berlusconi government in Italy was. There was a sense that “over there” it was another world, a bad and sad and incorrigible one. Most Americans wouldn’t remember that, and yet we pulled, and continue to pull, an epic Hold My Beer in comparison. What would it take to get a Million Man March again? One that occupied the lawn?
- mrits 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - geoduck14 2mo ago
    Please elaborate?
    - alephnan 2mo ago
      People are still buying German cars and Hugo Boss clothing aren’t they?
      - ceejayoz 2mo ago
        Germany made it illegal to display Nazi symbols and espouse their beliefs. (And hung a few.) A bit of a lesson learned, in part, from not spanking the Confederacy's leadership enough.
    - datsci_est_2015 2mo ago
      I had to think carefully, but I think they’re implying that the worst thing the US has done is invent Twitter, and comparing it to the worst thing that Europe has done (implying that that’s the holocaust), and that Europeans specifically(?) are being hyperbolic about the state of the US given the contrast between the two?
- jebarker 2mo ago
  > Eras like this one can be what kills an empire/great power. Is there actually any good analogue for this era that caused a previous empire or great power to collapse?
  - ceejayoz 2mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi... > The Roman Empire lost the strengths that had allowed it to exercise effective control over its Western provinces; modern historians posit factors including the effectiveness and numbers of the army (check), the health and numbers of the Roman population (check), the strength of the economy (check), the competence of the emperors (check), the internal struggles for power (check), the religious changes of the period (check), and the efficiency of the civil administration (check). Increasing pressure from invading peoples outside Roman culture (check) also contributed greatly to the collapse. Climatic changes (check) and both endemic and epidemic diseases (check) drove many of these immediate factors.
    - A_D_E_P_T 2mo ago
      You could look even earlier. There are a lot of similarities between Trump's style and Emperor Commodus's. And to paraphrase Cassius Dio, Commodus took an empire of gold and transformed it into one of iron and rust. Every time I hear people praise the stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius I am reminded of the fact that he failed in his most important duty: To plan well for his succession.
    - leereeves 2mo ago
      The two worst Roman emperors ruled hundreds of years before the fall: Caligula from 37 to 41 CE, Nero from 54 to 68 CE. Not many people could name, or recognize the name of, any emperor from the last hundred years of the Western Roman Empire. So I don't think Rome is a good analogue for the suggestion that the Trump era is going to kill the USA.
      - ceejayoz 2mo ago
- thm 2mo ago
  Great podcast on this: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0XqYCQT4PgD3axPy0w5Wcd https://open.spotify.com/episode/0XqYCQT4PgD3axPy0w5Wcd He calls this category certainty.
gchamonlive 2mo ago
In most areas (drug enforcement, basic education, healthcare, gun culture...) nobody should have been taking the US seriously maybe since Reagan. Finance, science and war were the only areas you could count on the US but now they went full Roman on the rest of the world not even that anymore. War is the only thing that's left I think.
- gota 2mo ago
  The US also arguably lost the Iran war. So far it can't claim any minor fraction of a victory, at least; seems to be the general consensus. I like to read Bret Devereaux (from the frequently HN posted https://acoup.blog/ https://acoup.blog/) takes on this in his Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social)
  - gchamonlive 2mo ago
    It doesn't win wars, but it provides the necessary equipment for carnage and stalemates all over the globe. Remember war is just a pretext, the objective is always profit, so as long as a lost war is very profitable it's a success in their books.
    - flossly 2mo ago
      As long as the profits of weapons contractors go up, it's considered a win. Most senate members are well invested, so they agree...
    - MisterTea 2mo ago
      IMO the last real war the US participated in and helped to win was WW2 giving it a massive ego. And even then it was drawn in via Pearl Harbor. After that it was a bunch of "wars" it fabricated to satisfy its ego with various (often poor) outcomes.
      - Sabinus 2mo ago
        I don't think it's fair to characterise the Cold War was an ego thing. Global authoritarian communism wouldn't have been a good time for the vast majority.
Aurornis 2mo ago
> No one is going to take the US seriously for the next 50 years. I hate this obvious pay-for-access thing as much as anyone, but this isn’t going to define the US for the next 50 years. The second the next president is in office every other country will adapt to working with them, just as been happening every 4-8 years.
- ceejayoz 2mo ago
  The American population has demonstrated that they'll nominate an insane criminal to power at random. Twice! I think that's gonna stick longer than the Bush to Clinton style transitions.
  - Aurornis 2mo ago
    I’m talking about the people with decision making power and the businesses working internationally. I have no doubt that certain individuals in other countries will be holding grudges against the United States for the rest of their lives long after the country has moved on, but it doesn’t really have any effect. If you’ve spent some time traveling the world every country has older generations who have some grudge against other countries for events that happened prior to most people being born and the younger generations don’t care. The world changes and most people move on.
    - ceejayoz 2mo ago
      > I’m talking about the people with decision making power and the businesses working internationally. As am I. At a certain point, you get bitten enough times that you decide the angry cobra isn't a great pet. It may be really cool, sometimes! But sometimes it hurts you, a lot. > If you’ve spent some time traveling the world every country has older generations who have some grudge against other countries for events that happened prior to most people being born and the younger generations don’t care. Some end this way, sure. For an alternative, see Gaza.
    - hgoel 2mo ago
      They're also talking about decision makers. They're going to operate with the consideration that Americans might elect another mad man. Anything requiring more than one presidential term's time will be much more carefully hedged.
whywhywhywhy 2mo ago
If insider trading is your concern then the country hasn't been serious for a long time, everyone in government does it and it's never punished even when exploited to the levels of 9 figures of assets. Should just be legalized at this point so we can all take advantage if they're all gonna get away with it.
- chinathrow 2mo ago
  > Should just be legalized at this point so we can all take advantage if they're all gonna get away with it. Is this satire?
  - stuaxo 2mo ago
    I fear not, look at which website we are on.
- A_D_E_P_T 2mo ago
  > everyone in government does it and it's never punished even when exploited to the levels of 9 figures of assets. Statements like this are worthless without examples. Surely you can provide some? Hard mode: Don't mention Pelosi or Clinton.
  - whywhywhywhy 2mo ago
    > Hard mode: Don't mention Pelosi or Clinton. "Argue with me but don't mention these things that prove your side correct"
    - A_D_E_P_T 2mo ago
      All you have are those two examples, who really look bush league in comparison to what's going on now? That's it? What happened to "everyone does it"?
- sethammons 2mo ago
  You will never be the insider. That's a privileged position. "We all" can't take advantage of it. Insiders trading laws are there so "we all" have a chance in the markets.
micromacrofoot 2mo ago
The messed up part is that it's not even technically insider trading as long as they release the same information publicly shortly after... so they're not actually breaking any laws. So much of the way the US government has operated is based on some shared standard of moral sense that the current administration lacks completely.
- DaiPlusPlus 2mo ago
  > it's not even technically insider trading as long as they release the same information publicly shortly after... so they're not actually breaking any laws No, that’s a canonical example of insider trading: acting on pre-release inside information before it’s made public; it doesn’t matter if it’s days, hours, or even minutes before it goes public. People have been convicted for executing trades when they saw or handled earnings reports in-person hours before they’re released[1]. [1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/employee-securities-filing-agent-sentenced-27-months-prison-insider-trading https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/employee-securities-fil...
  - micromacrofoot 2mo ago
    Insider trading requires breach of duty, if you don't have fiduciary duty with who you're trading against it's not insider trading. The required chain in the link is someone inside a contractual agreement providing information. It's right in your own link, the filing-agent employee was convicted because he stole information he was contractually obligated to protect. Remove that obligation and there's no case. Truth Social owns the posts and is selling them with the source's blessing, nobody's stealing anything. As much as I hate to say it, what they're doing with Truth social is very likely legal. The president does not have any contractual financial obligation to these companies, if he posts "everyone sell Intel, I'm going to regulate out of existence" to a group of people who paid him for this post early... there's no breach of contract anywhere.
    - sethammons 2mo ago
      That is absolutely not true. Your brother in law gives you insider information and you use it, you go to prison. You have no fiduciary duty, but you still had insider information. I have seen this happen in real life.
jmyeet 2mo ago
The US gained almost immeasurable power and influence by virtue of the 2 World Wars and being largely directly unaffected by those wars, whereas Europe was levelled, particularly by WW2. And that power came from selling weapons. The world order was reset after 1945 and designed largely by the US for the benefit of the US, particularly the financial system. People will often mistake cause and effect. A common one is the petrodollar. The US dollar isn't strong because oil is traded in it. No. Oil is traded in the dollar because of demand fo the dollar. The world oil market could switch to Euros or RMB tomorrow and the net effect would be that people would hold USD and trade it for whatever currency as needed and convert any such currency immediately back to dollars. But underpinning this has been the appearance of integrity in the US financial system and, in particular, the Federal Reserve and the SEC. That trust and that system is being rapidly destroyed for a few billion dollars in personal profit. All of this was enabled by an ideological Supreme Court who invented out of thin air the concept of presidential immunity to make the president a king in a country that rebelled against a monarchy. We're living in times that will be written about in history books as the end of the post-1945 era, particularly with the Iran War. I, for one, called this the most disastrous US strategic defeat in the entire of US history and it's not even close back in April. And I stand by that. There was a time when corrupt heads of state kept up appearances of not being corrupt. It was done in secret through layers of secrecy. That's gone now. The corruption is very much out in the open. It's not to see this as anything other than China's rise to global prominence and the irony is they just had to do nothing while letting the US commit suicide.
- ihumanable 2mo ago
  I think that's been the most baffling thing about the rise of MAGA. It was a global order built by the US to place the US in positions of power and privilege in every way imaginable. And the MAGA group looked at it and said "we are being taken advantage of! We have to spend a rounding error worth of money on food aid and Voice of America?! I don't want soft power, I want rock hard power!!!" They looked at a game with unfair rules that were written by them to benefit them and said "this is unfair.... to me!" Then went about dismantling nearly a century of work that unfairly stacked the deck in America's favor. The US-Israel-Iran War is an interesting inflection point. They pulled out of every soft-power play, putting every chip in on hard-power military strength and now they are getting wrecked by cheap drones and Iran just being willing to stick it out and not fold. Venezuela will probably go down as the point in which they believed their world view was winning, no need for any diplomacy, just go in and abduct the president and take the oil. Iran showed them the limits of that kind of thinking, if they were more introspective they could learn from it.
krzys 2mo ago
You have Roman Empire at home...
thisislife2 2mo ago
As a foreigner to the US and its politics, it is both refreshing and depressing to see Trump as a President. It is refreshing because Trump is straight-forward and transparent that America has always been a country for the rich, run by the rich. In the final political outcome, his foreign policy politics really isn't anything different from other past Presidents (Democrats or Republicans) except that unlike them, he doesn't strive to pretend to be goody two-shoes. It is depressing because once the facade of democratic political theatrics is ripped apart by the President himself, Americans will invariably lose faith due to the ugly and cynical politics it exposes.
- eleumik 2mo ago
  All talk about empires laws tribes, but for me the point is about the limits of capitalism / free market economy if there is no basic control of state on economy like preventing distortions, monopoly. Orwell meant socialism in animal farm but the point is the same: all are equal but some are more equal than others. Same path, slower
- Toutouxc 2mo ago
  I think I understand what you’re saying, but I’d also argue that he’s everything but straightforward and transparent. I could totally respect a politician with a different opinion, but not a rambling idiot who has every possible opinion at once.
  - thisislife2 2mo ago
    That's his own personal style of "distractionary" politics. It's really no different from the commonplace adversarial politicking of other American politicians (that all seem have to adopted in the last 4-5 decades), where whatever one says or do is cheered by one group and treated as something repulsive by the other. You getting irritated or offended by what he says is the desired response because it distracts you from the real issues.
Cthulhu_ 2mo ago
And the big issue is that everyone jumps on it (professionals and amateurs alike) because of FOMO; the past 15, 20 years have been wild in that regard, with loads of things soaring in value going from Apple, to Tesla, via Bitcoin and pokemon cards / "the everything bubble" to now anything involving AI. And people want to catch the boat this time. It's one reason why NFTs took off as hard as they did (before collapsing). And it becomes self-reinforcing, with people simping (to use that word again) for whichever thing they've invested in. I have serious doubts people actually believe in $product, but they believe other people will at the very least invest in it. And they all believe the masses are stupider (and have more money to invest) than they do. Finally, it's the wild west. Regulation and consequences have failed, because the people enriching themselves are running the show now. At least in the US, but thanks to open financial ties, they can get money from more regulated countries as well.

Or possibly ever again. Eras like this one can be what kills an empire/great power. I think one of the greater risks to a power like the U.S. is getting old enough where it's felt like things always were, and therefore always will be. When there is no-longer a grandparent at the dinner table who can even tell you when his grandparent at the dinner table spoke about the before times.

rubyfan 2mo ago
Right, the fact that the current administration had a 4 year hiatus only extended this period. Think about all the young people that grew up with this as normal.
- reactordev 2mo ago
  Reinforced by the Parnas', Lambert's, Kirk's and Loomer's on TikTok. Ready to vote in the next midterms. Thinking 9/11 was an inside job...
- flossly 2mo ago
  Sorry, as an outsider, I think it has been a clown show for much longer. The whole Hunter corruption scandal in Ukraine + the laptop made it quite clear to me back then. And I can go on.
  - blini-kot 2mo ago
    yep, they have a hard time grasping the fact that its been the same for the past 40-60 years the only exception now is not the corrupt administration, but the one being the most inept and blatant at being corrupt as opposed to its predecessors
    - salemh 2mo ago
      [dead]
    - flossly 2mo ago
      There's a Trump hate raging, but, as you also have seen: it's nothing new. Just the crazy partisanism that's going on in the states blinds people to the fact that they are not ruled by one part of the other, but that the parties are the smoke and mirrors of the non-democratic, unelected, unaccountable, unseen actual govt.
      - blini-kot 2mo ago
        exactly, yep
  - saulapremium 2mo ago
    The Hunter corruption scandal is to the current administration as a drop of water is to a swimming pool. But I have no doubt that you can go on.
  - no-name-here 2mo ago
    What do you believe happened re: Ukraine? What was the absolute worst thing from the laptop? Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira... Hunter Biden laptop controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers... 2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Trump%E2%80%93Ukraine_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Trump%E2%80%93Ukraine_sca...
  - gopher_space 2mo ago
    Quite clear that people don't understand the basics of forensics. Watching people ruin their professional reputation over something they desperately want to believe in was quite the education.
- ben_w 2mo ago
  Grandparents telling about their grandparents is a very different timescale than two presidential terms with a gap of just one between them. The "what changed in the 1970s?" meme graphs are the kinds of timescale for forgetting what is and isn't "normal" for your grandparents, and the Great Depression for your grandparents' grandparents. Eternal growth? Nah. Even the worst of times will be shortly followed by a recovery, soon enough you survive on savings? Pft. The President surely wouldn't consider to order the removal of protesting veterans, with the Army Chief of Staff implementing this order with a contingent of infantry and cavalry, supported by six tanks, burning the belongings that the veterans had left behind after being cleared from where they had been protesting? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army Conscription? Concentration camps? These are also in the "grandparents' grandparents" timescale in the USA. Go back only a one more generation and you get lynching *postcards*.
- browningstreet 2mo ago
  I remember tales of how backwards and corrupt the Berlusconi government in Italy was. There was a sense that “over there” it was another world, a bad and sad and incorrigible one. Most Americans wouldn’t remember that, and yet we pulled, and continue to pull, an epic Hold My Beer in comparison. What would it take to get a Million Man March again? One that occupied the lawn?
mrits 2mo ago
[flagged]
- geoduck14 2mo ago
  Please elaborate?
  - alephnan 2mo ago
    People are still buying German cars and Hugo Boss clothing aren’t they?
    - ceejayoz 2mo ago
      Germany made it illegal to display Nazi symbols and espouse their beliefs. (And hung a few.) A bit of a lesson learned, in part, from not spanking the Confederacy's leadership enough.
  - datsci_est_2015 2mo ago
    I had to think carefully, but I think they’re implying that the worst thing the US has done is invent Twitter, and comparing it to the worst thing that Europe has done (implying that that’s the holocaust), and that Europeans specifically(?) are being hyperbolic about the state of the US given the contrast between the two?
jebarker 2mo ago
> Eras like this one can be what kills an empire/great power. Is there actually any good analogue for this era that caused a previous empire or great power to collapse?
- ceejayoz 2mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi... > The Roman Empire lost the strengths that had allowed it to exercise effective control over its Western provinces; modern historians posit factors including the effectiveness and numbers of the army (check), the health and numbers of the Roman population (check), the strength of the economy (check), the competence of the emperors (check), the internal struggles for power (check), the religious changes of the period (check), and the efficiency of the civil administration (check). Increasing pressure from invading peoples outside Roman culture (check) also contributed greatly to the collapse. Climatic changes (check) and both endemic and epidemic diseases (check) drove many of these immediate factors.
  - A_D_E_P_T 2mo ago
    You could look even earlier. There are a lot of similarities between Trump's style and Emperor Commodus's. And to paraphrase Cassius Dio, Commodus took an empire of gold and transformed it into one of iron and rust. Every time I hear people praise the stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius I am reminded of the fact that he failed in his most important duty: To plan well for his succession.
  - leereeves 2mo ago
    The two worst Roman emperors ruled hundreds of years before the fall: Caligula from 37 to 41 CE, Nero from 54 to 68 CE. Not many people could name, or recognize the name of, any emperor from the last hundred years of the Western Roman Empire. So I don't think Rome is a good analogue for the suggestion that the Trump era is going to kill the USA.
    - ceejayoz 2mo ago
thm 2mo ago
Great podcast on this: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0XqYCQT4PgD3axPy0w5Wcd https://open.spotify.com/episode/0XqYCQT4PgD3axPy0w5Wcd He calls this category certainty.

gchamonlive 2mo ago

In most areas (drug enforcement, basic education, healthcare, gun culture...) nobody should have been taking the US seriously maybe since Reagan. Finance, science and war were the only areas you could count on the US but now they went full Roman on the rest of the world not even that anymore. War is the only thing that's left I think.

gota 2mo ago
The US also arguably lost the Iran war. So far it can't claim any minor fraction of a victory, at least; seems to be the general consensus. I like to read Bret Devereaux (from the frequently HN posted https://acoup.blog/ https://acoup.blog/) takes on this in his Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social)
- gchamonlive 2mo ago
  It doesn't win wars, but it provides the necessary equipment for carnage and stalemates all over the globe. Remember war is just a pretext, the objective is always profit, so as long as a lost war is very profitable it's a success in their books.
  - flossly 2mo ago
    As long as the profits of weapons contractors go up, it's considered a win. Most senate members are well invested, so they agree...
  - MisterTea 2mo ago
    IMO the last real war the US participated in and helped to win was WW2 giving it a massive ego. And even then it was drawn in via Pearl Harbor. After that it was a bunch of "wars" it fabricated to satisfy its ego with various (often poor) outcomes.
    - Sabinus 2mo ago
      I don't think it's fair to characterise the Cold War was an ego thing. Global authoritarian communism wouldn't have been a good time for the vast majority.

Aurornis 2mo ago

> No one is going to take the US seriously for the next 50 years. I hate this obvious pay-for-access thing as much as anyone, but this isn’t going to define the US for the next 50 years. The second the next president is in office every other country will adapt to working with them, just as been happening every 4-8 years.

ceejayoz 2mo ago
The American population has demonstrated that they'll nominate an insane criminal to power at random. Twice! I think that's gonna stick longer than the Bush to Clinton style transitions.
- Aurornis 2mo ago
  I’m talking about the people with decision making power and the businesses working internationally. I have no doubt that certain individuals in other countries will be holding grudges against the United States for the rest of their lives long after the country has moved on, but it doesn’t really have any effect. If you’ve spent some time traveling the world every country has older generations who have some grudge against other countries for events that happened prior to most people being born and the younger generations don’t care. The world changes and most people move on.
  - ceejayoz 2mo ago
    > I’m talking about the people with decision making power and the businesses working internationally. As am I. At a certain point, you get bitten enough times that you decide the angry cobra isn't a great pet. It may be really cool, sometimes! But sometimes it hurts you, a lot. > If you’ve spent some time traveling the world every country has older generations who have some grudge against other countries for events that happened prior to most people being born and the younger generations don’t care. Some end this way, sure. For an alternative, see Gaza.
  - hgoel 2mo ago
    They're also talking about decision makers. They're going to operate with the consideration that Americans might elect another mad man. Anything requiring more than one presidential term's time will be much more carefully hedged.

whywhywhywhy 2mo ago

If insider trading is your concern then the country hasn't been serious for a long time, everyone in government does it and it's never punished even when exploited to the levels of 9 figures of assets. Should just be legalized at this point so we can all take advantage if they're all gonna get away with it.

chinathrow 2mo ago
> Should just be legalized at this point so we can all take advantage if they're all gonna get away with it. Is this satire?
- stuaxo 2mo ago
  I fear not, look at which website we are on.
A_D_E_P_T 2mo ago
> everyone in government does it and it's never punished even when exploited to the levels of 9 figures of assets. Statements like this are worthless without examples. Surely you can provide some? Hard mode: Don't mention Pelosi or Clinton.
- whywhywhywhy 2mo ago
  > Hard mode: Don't mention Pelosi or Clinton. "Argue with me but don't mention these things that prove your side correct"
  - A_D_E_P_T 2mo ago
    All you have are those two examples, who really look bush league in comparison to what's going on now? That's it? What happened to "everyone does it"?
sethammons 2mo ago
You will never be the insider. That's a privileged position. "We all" can't take advantage of it. Insiders trading laws are there so "we all" have a chance in the markets.

micromacrofoot 2mo ago

The messed up part is that it's not even technically insider trading as long as they release the same information publicly shortly after... so they're not actually breaking any laws. So much of the way the US government has operated is based on some shared standard of moral sense that the current administration lacks completely.

DaiPlusPlus 2mo ago
> it's not even technically insider trading as long as they release the same information publicly shortly after... so they're not actually breaking any laws No, that’s a canonical example of insider trading: acting on pre-release inside information before it’s made public; it doesn’t matter if it’s days, hours, or even minutes before it goes public. People have been convicted for executing trades when they saw or handled earnings reports in-person hours before they’re released[1]. [1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/employee-securities-filing-agent-sentenced-27-months-prison-insider-trading https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/employee-securities-fil...
- micromacrofoot 2mo ago
  Insider trading requires breach of duty, if you don't have fiduciary duty with who you're trading against it's not insider trading. The required chain in the link is someone inside a contractual agreement providing information. It's right in your own link, the filing-agent employee was convicted because he stole information he was contractually obligated to protect. Remove that obligation and there's no case. Truth Social owns the posts and is selling them with the source's blessing, nobody's stealing anything. As much as I hate to say it, what they're doing with Truth social is very likely legal. The president does not have any contractual financial obligation to these companies, if he posts "everyone sell Intel, I'm going to regulate out of existence" to a group of people who paid him for this post early... there's no breach of contract anywhere.
  - sethammons 2mo ago
    That is absolutely not true. Your brother in law gives you insider information and you use it, you go to prison. You have no fiduciary duty, but you still had insider information. I have seen this happen in real life.

jmyeet 2mo ago

The US gained almost immeasurable power and influence by virtue of the 2 World Wars and being largely directly unaffected by those wars, whereas Europe was levelled, particularly by WW2. And that power came from selling weapons. The world order was reset after 1945 and designed largely by the US for the benefit of the US, particularly the financial system. People will often mistake cause and effect. A common one is the petrodollar. The US dollar isn't strong because oil is traded in it. No. Oil is traded in the dollar because of demand fo the dollar. The world oil market could switch to Euros or RMB tomorrow and the net effect would be that people would hold USD and trade it for whatever currency as needed and convert any such currency immediately back to dollars. But underpinning this has been the appearance of integrity in the US financial system and, in particular, the Federal Reserve and the SEC. That trust and that system is being rapidly destroyed for a few billion dollars in personal profit. All of this was enabled by an ideological Supreme Court who invented out of thin air the concept of presidential immunity to make the president a king in a country that rebelled against a monarchy. We're living in times that will be written about in history books as the end of the post-1945 era, particularly with the Iran War. I, for one, called this the most disastrous US strategic defeat in the entire of US history and it's not even close back in April. And I stand by that. There was a time when corrupt heads of state kept up appearances of not being corrupt. It was done in secret through layers of secrecy. That's gone now. The corruption is very much out in the open. It's not to see this as anything other than China's rise to global prominence and the irony is they just had to do nothing while letting the US commit suicide.

ihumanable 2mo ago
I think that's been the most baffling thing about the rise of MAGA. It was a global order built by the US to place the US in positions of power and privilege in every way imaginable. And the MAGA group looked at it and said "we are being taken advantage of! We have to spend a rounding error worth of money on food aid and Voice of America?! I don't want soft power, I want rock hard power!!!" They looked at a game with unfair rules that were written by them to benefit them and said "this is unfair.... to me!" Then went about dismantling nearly a century of work that unfairly stacked the deck in America's favor. The US-Israel-Iran War is an interesting inflection point. They pulled out of every soft-power play, putting every chip in on hard-power military strength and now they are getting wrecked by cheap drones and Iran just being willing to stick it out and not fold. Venezuela will probably go down as the point in which they believed their world view was winning, no need for any diplomacy, just go in and abduct the president and take the oil. Iran showed them the limits of that kind of thinking, if they were more introspective they could learn from it.

krzys 2mo ago

You have Roman Empire at home...

thisislife2 2mo ago

As a foreigner to the US and its politics, it is both refreshing and depressing to see Trump as a President. It is refreshing because Trump is straight-forward and transparent that America has always been a country for the rich, run by the rich. In the final political outcome, his foreign policy politics really isn't anything different from other past Presidents (Democrats or Republicans) except that unlike them, he doesn't strive to pretend to be goody two-shoes. It is depressing because once the facade of democratic political theatrics is ripped apart by the President himself, Americans will invariably lose faith due to the ugly and cynical politics it exposes.

eleumik 2mo ago
All talk about empires laws tribes, but for me the point is about the limits of capitalism / free market economy if there is no basic control of state on economy like preventing distortions, monopoly. Orwell meant socialism in animal farm but the point is the same: all are equal but some are more equal than others. Same path, slower
Toutouxc 2mo ago
I think I understand what you’re saying, but I’d also argue that he’s everything but straightforward and transparent. I could totally respect a politician with a different opinion, but not a rambling idiot who has every possible opinion at once.
- thisislife2 2mo ago
  That's his own personal style of "distractionary" politics. It's really no different from the commonplace adversarial politicking of other American politicians (that all seem have to adopted in the last 4-5 decades), where whatever one says or do is cheered by one group and treated as something repulsive by the other. You getting irritated or offended by what he says is the desired response because it distracts you from the real issues.

Cthulhu_ 2mo ago

And the big issue is that everyone jumps on it (professionals and amateurs alike) because of FOMO; the past 15, 20 years have been wild in that regard, with loads of things soaring in value going from Apple, to Tesla, via Bitcoin and pokemon cards / "the everything bubble" to now anything involving AI. And people want to catch the boat this time. It's one reason why NFTs took off as hard as they did (before collapsing). And it becomes self-reinforcing, with people simping (to use that word again) for whichever thing they've invested in. I have serious doubts people actually believe in $product, but they believe other people will at the very least invest in it. And they all believe the masses are stupider (and have more money to invest) than they do. Finally, it's the wild west. Regulation and consequences have failed, because the people enriching themselves are running the show now. At least in the US, but thanks to open financial ties, they can get money from more regulated countries as well.