This is also equal to the percentage of Americans who wanted to forcefully depose Maduro. And the low percentage did not stop Trump. Unfortunately this same low percentage by itself will not stop Trump from attacking Greenland.
(On a side note, I was quite surprised when during Trump’s inaugural speech on Jan 20 2025 he said America will expand its territory. I had no idea he really meant to attack other countries. How little did I know)
Invading Venezuela is not even remotely the same thing as invading a fellow NATO country, and most Americans know it. If Trump tries to invade, he'll trigger a domestic crisis. i.e. Will congress block it? Will the military obey orders? How severe will the protests be?
If Trump quells all that and his invasion goes ahead, he'll trigger an international crisis too. Does NATO simply implode, or do the EU and other former-NATO countries form an anti-U.S. alliance? What kind of insurgency forms in Greenland? Does what's left of the old world order turn against the U.S. with economic sanctions? Does China take advantage of the moment to finally invade Taiwan? How loudly will Putin be laughing during all this?
We can only hope Trump is merely trying to distract people from the Epstein files with a bluff.
Regarding an 'invasion' of Greenland, it would actually be done in a day, and I highly doubt an effective insurgency would form. The US already has military control over the territory, and the population is way too low and concentrated to offer opposition.
This is implicit in the reaction of the EU: If the US takes over Greenland, Europe will close down all American bases in Europe.
This is what makes this particular foreign policy so incredibly stupid: The US already gets everything it needs from Denmark/Greenland. The US is considering throwing away European allies to have their flag be bigger on a world map.
Yes, it could be done quickly. There are only several population centres of any note, often separated by hundreds of miles/km but Nuuk would be the main target.
If Trump does something it will be the same as with Venezuela. This invalidates most of your pointed questions against it happening.
These questions would at most be raised after it already happened, and after watching a few political influencer like Zack who routinely gets 50k+ viewers I suspect your trust in "most Americans know the difference" to be exaggerated, sadly.
This scenario also strongly reminds me of an old fable from the Middle ages, where the king reassures the peasant that the noble will be punished if he kills the peasant... But what meaning does such a punishment have for the peasant who'd be dead?
So yeah, there will be political fallout once Trump's invades it's ally Denmark, at it will invalidate NATO entirely. But does that matter to the annexed people? They'll still have lost their sovereignty to be exploited by American mega corporations.
Take a second look at Venezuela. Congress passed an act limiting Trump's ability to operate in the country. The U.S. is currently not occupying or controlling the country. They have not effected regime change. The former VP has taken over and may take some pro-U.S. actions due to threats of being kidnapped but, with Maduro gone, she could be replaced at any moment. Meanwhile, U.S. oil execs are balking at doing anything in Venezuela and all Trump can do to keep Venezuela on the front page (instead of the Epstein files) is continue pirating oil tankers.
Venezuela could realistically come out of this with their sovereignty intact and no significant U.S. takeover of their oil industry materializing. If anything, the lesson we should learn here is that Trump is so inept that, should he try to take over Greenland, he may trigger all the negative consequences of doing so without actually accomplishing much of anything. Someone living in Nuuk, far from any American military base, might be forgiven for not noticing when they wake up in an American territory. A couple of leaders might get a promotion and the cheques may start coming from Washington rather than Copenhagen, but the Americans may have no interest in governing Greenlanders and American mining companies may refuse to get bogged down in another one of Trump's swamps.
What may happen to Venezuela is not the point. The point is how little control American people have on this Administration (which BTW last week started effectively giving immunity to ICE agents who kill Americans)
The reason they are bringing the whole crew back is most likely cost related. The whole crew was due back in February anyway. They are bringing everyone home a bit early; otherwise they would need another flight a few weeks later.
And nobody is retreating: there will be 1 American and 2 Russians left on ISS. All of this from the article.
How do you think MAGA will consume itself? What is the catalyst for MAGA consuming itself?
Since Jan 2nd I am thinking MAGA will be less talking and more doing, up to turning USA into a dictatorship. (Doing things like attacking Venezuela for no reason and providing immunity for ICE agents who murder American citizens)
re: " the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, anyway" - not as much as you make it out to be. Large US corporations keep a pile of their profits outside the US. In theory this money would be taxed when it would be re-patriated to their US-based investors. In practice the corporations wait for the next Republican president to pass a tax holiday during which money transferred from outside the US to the US-investors is not taxed. GWB did that, Trump did that in his first term too.
Could you please expand on this: "after Congress raided the Social Security account..."? What do you mean by that? AFAIK, Social Security contributions stay within the Social Security Fund - they cannot be used by US government to pay its bills.
> Could you please expand on this: "after Congress raided the Social Security account..."?
I'd ask you, and others reading my previous comment, to scratch this off as a bad choice of words on my part and replace it with:
"by moving to a pay-as-you-go policy for the SSTF, Congress made the point that Social Security is just another tax."
Previously I used "raiding" as a far-fetched metaphor for several different processes which are too complex to discuss here and it would distract from the main point: instead of complex itemization, SSFT & MCFT would be better off as parts of general taxation.
> AFAIK, Social Security contributions stay within the Social Security Fund - they cannot be used by US government to pay its bills.
True in theory, but if we look at how surpluses are handled and how they depend on a manually controlled interest rate we'll see a different reality.
How would massive inflationary printing solve the fact that at some point in the future there will not be enough people working to support people in retirement? (I think inflation would make the problem worse, as the current amount of money in the Social Security Fund would lose its value. But I could be wrong.)
Printing could fund entitlements at the cost of diluting purchasing power for everyone (including retirees). But Social Security is indexed to inflation, so it would pay out more as long as the government chooses to fund it through whatever means are available. Effectively this would continue to fund retirees while taxing all nonretirees, especially those who don’t own assets. Not a great situation and it would have political consequences, but it is theoretically possible.
I think we have enough people to theoretically support retirees (Japan does it with worse TFR), the problem is that declining relative wages makes it politically difficult, as lower earners would share a disproportionate burden. And retirement is just one issue of many, we are trying to run a giant resource-hungry country on a service economy. We’re only able to get away with this by using our aging military resources to force other countries to accept our role as a global middleman. It isn’t sustainable.
I now understand what you mean. This is how post-WW1 Germany tried to pay its WW1 "fines" which were pegged to gold [0]. The result was hyper-inflation - and 2 years later when this scheme was thrown out the currency stabilized. Most likely the same would happen in your scenario - the retirees would come ahead for a while, but only for a short time. So I do not think this is a solution for retirees (no matter their large political power)
These days currencies have no real assets behind them. One cannot expect to be able to purchase real goods / services indefinitely with a fictional construct (fiat currency)
It’s more complicated than that, as Germany’s punitive war debt was designed to cripple it and it didn’t have many options. It’s actually fairly difficult to create hyperinflation without being trapped in an extreme situation. But I agree that it’s generally a bad idea to put yourself at risk of it.
Fiat isn’t necessarily backed by nothing, that’s a misconception. It’s backed by the strength of the underlying economy, the perceived value of claims on the nation’s resources and services, the political stability of the nation, and the need to hold that currency for trade. The problem with fiat is that when those things are in decline, the lack of hard assets can cause a rapid devaluation, as the “invisible assets” backing the currency are now devalued. This compounds the decline.
Ok ok. I can’t wait to see how 2026 and 2027 will shake out. Trump’s choice to replace Jerome Powell will drive short term interest rates to zero because, among other things, US pays around $1 trillion / year in interest for its debt.
Getting these rates to 0 will require the Fed to print massive amounts of USD. Let’s see then how the USD is backed by something other than thin air.
(BTW - lots of countries managed to achieve hyperinflation: Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Russia and my home country of Romania in the 90s. It is not that difficult)
If they lower rates too much, they will have a problem finding buyers for Treasuries, so they are somewhat constrained. We’re not living in the pre-Covid era anymore, and people have better options than low % US Treasuries. The only way I can imagine ZIRP again is if a deflationary crash were about to hit. That might happen (eventually it will happen) but I am not foolish enough to bet on the timing.
The awkward US system is fairly robust against hyperinflation because the government can’t just print money directly. The one option for doing this, minting a “trillion dollar coin” and depositing it with the Treasury, is extremely risky because of the potential impact on normal Treasury funding. I would only expect this as a last resort when the economy is already heading towards disaster.
I suspect that true hyperinflation is an artifact of nations with wrecked economies trying to sustain themselves on fiat. Once you reach that point it’s already too late, so hyperinflation is a symptom, not the cause. In effect it’s a default on debts and a collapse of the monetary system.
In Azure - which I think is at Google scale - everything is dynamically linked. Actually a lot of Azure is built on C# which does not even support static linking...
Statically linking being necessary for scaling does not pass the smell test for me.
I never worked for Google, but have seen some strange things like bit flips at more modest scales. From the parent description, it looks like defaulting to static binaries is helping to speed up troubleshooting to remove the “this should never happen, but statistically will happen every so often” class of bugs.
As I see it, the issue isn’t requiring static compiling to scale. It’s requiring it to make troubleshooting or measuring performance at scale easier. Not required, per se, but very helpful.
Exactly. SRE is about monitoring and troubleshooting at scale.
Google runs on a microservices architecture. It's done that since before that was cool. You have to do a lot to make a microservices architecture work. Google did not advertise a lot of that. Today we have things like Data Dog that give you some of the basics. But for a long time, people who left Google faced a world of pain because of how far behind the rest of the world was.
Azure's devops record is not nearly as good as Google's was.
The biggest datasets that ChatGPT is aware of being processed in complex analytics jobs on Azure are roughly a thousand times smaller than an estimate of Google's regularly processed snapshot of the web. There is a reason why most of the fundamental advancements in how to parallelize data and computations - such as map-reduce and BigTable - all came from Google. Nobody else worked at their scale before they did. (Then Google published it, and people began to implement it. Then failed to understand what was operationally important to making it actually work at scale...)
So, despite how big it is, I don't think that Azure operates at Google scale.
For the record, back when I worked at Google, the public internet was only the third largest network that I knew of. Larger still was the network that Google uses for internal API calls. (Do you have any idea how many API calls it takes to serve a Google search page?) And larger still was the network that kept data synchronized between data centers. (So, for example, you don't lose your mail if a data center goes down.)
Does AWS have a good reputation in devops? Because large chunks of AWS are built on Java - which also does not offer static linking (bundling a bunch of *.jar files into one exe does not count as static linking). Still does not pass the smell test.
In AWS, only the very core Infra-as-a-Service that they dogfood can be considered "good", Everything else that's more Platform-as-a-Service can be considered a half baked leaky abstraction. Anything they release as "GA" especially around ReInvent should be avoided for a minimum of 6 months-1 year since it's more like a public Beta with some guaranteed bugs.
In AWS, only the very core Infra-as-a-Service that they dogfood can be considered "good" - large chunks of which are, by the way, written in Java. I think you are proving my point...
which just means Java isn't affected? or your definition of not not counting bundled and not shared jars as static linking is wrong, since they achieve the same effect.
The only lesson that China can learn from Russia is to not invade their neighbor. It did not work out at all for Russia; if China invades Taiwan it will not work out for them either.
Well, recognizing Taiwan as an independent country for starters. The countries that recognize Taiwan are not recognized as independent states by China.
(On a side note, I was quite surprised when during Trump’s inaugural speech on Jan 20 2025 he said America will expand its territory. I had no idea he really meant to attack other countries. How little did I know)
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