Trump wants to replace the new EMALS aircraft launch system on carriers with old steam systems even though steam systems are worse and would require rebuilding ships.
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration so focused on building more naval ships, that they let commercial shipbuilding move overseas, ending subsidies. Naval ship demand will go up and down and is not consistent; the base of a country’s ship building industry will need to be commercial. By allowing, and helping by ending the subsidies, US commercial shipbuilding to move overseas, the Reagen administration ultimately greatly weakened US shipbuilding capacity despite building a lot of naval ships. China has a strong industrial base for shipbuilding because they build commercial ships.
Trump and Musk attacked the bureaucracy without understanding what it actually did, doing much damage.
Musk could have focused on helping upgrade the government’s technology, something badly needed, instead, he just destroyed a bunch of stuff he didn’t understand.
While doing DOGE, Musk repeatedly made false statements. It seems like he had to be lying, but, Musk’s close friends claim that he never lies, meaning, Musk just easily deludes himself into believing a lot of false shit. Being a great businessman and technologist doesn’t mean you aren’t incompetent and massively deluded about other topics.
With the chaos DOGE caused, rather than saving money, DOGE cost the American people.
The bureaucracy is mostly filled with loyal law followers. If you want to break the law, it makes sense to destroy the bureaucracy.
Under Trump, datasets disappear. Rather than the government keeping data to help understand society and help inform decision makers and the American people, Trump has pushed the government to keep and create data for the purpose of making Trump look good.
Many public servants are there out of a sense of public spiritedness, and the Trump administration treats them not simply like employees who need to be cut for good reasons…but like the enemy and some of the administration seems to get enjoyment out of cruelty.
One DOGE guy went into DOGE to fix government, and then he took an interview with a journalist and said that government wasn’t as inefficient as he thought, then he was fired.
Under Trump, US foreign policy involves helping the businesses of Trump and his friends rather than just a focus on what’s best for the United States and its people as a whole. This allows countries to indirectly bribe Trump to change the foreign policy of the United States.
US democracy is declining, and democracies often slowly shift into something that is not really democracy, rather than suddenly becoming autocratic in one dramatic moment.
Trump tariffed India for buying Russian oil, and now Trump is buying Russian diesel, which is a form of refined oil. He has turned the United States into a hypocritical country with no principles, who no one should trust because no words, no deal, means anything. The country has always had to look out for itself, but the repeated backing out of deals, including ones made by Trump, the repeated economic and military aggression, and the naked unprincipled hypocrisy has turned the United States into an asshole country.
Statistics and econometrics alone are not science! They are tools that are a part of science. We need to do more than just find correlations, but also understand how things works. We should understand the cause and effect story, including the mechanisms that create the correlations.
An economist who has studied traits like executive functioning thinks it’s too late for Trump to have good executive functioning. He deeply criticized Trump, but also feared a left-wing socialist response.
The strikes and war on Iran have delayed Iran’s nuclear program for up to two years. The Iranian nuclear deal that Trump abandoned in his first term delayed Iran’s nuclear program by ten to fifteen years.
Trump repeatedly screams fraud when there is an election outcome he doesn’t like, even in elections he wasn’t running in. And of course, without even close to decent evidence…
2016 Republican Primaries, 2016 US presidential election, 2018 US midterms, 2020 US presidential election, 2022 US midterms…
He even claims it in elections he won to claim “in reality” he won bigger!
The Houthis aren’t simply an ethnic nationalist group, they are Islamist who want to conquer all Yemen and indoctrinate people into their theocracy. They are brutal and oppressive to the people they conquer.
If the world wants to defeat the Houthis, they need to diligently train a Yemeni force, support it with air power, and see the war through to the end.