Ask someone in a third world country to do some basic addition and they can do it pretty easily. Ask the average American, and they can’t. We’ve become dependent on calculators. AI may be like this for a much broader range of thinking and we risk turning ourselves into morons.
The China shock was actually quite minor compared to the size of the US population. Most lost jobs are due to automation, not China. Tariffs don’t solve this. Dumb tariffs, like Trump’s tariffs, make it worse.
The French riots started with typical left wing protesters that legitimately protest. Black bloc anarchists took advantage to skillfully attack police and other locations. As the protests dissipated, there were people everywhere, and it is hard for police to be everywhere at once. Once a level of chaos starts, young hoodlums realize they can get away with shit, and they come in to loot. They loot because they are poor, because looting is fun, and possibly because they are angry about something ideologically.
The protestors are mostly white, and so are the black bloc, but the hoodlums contain many minorities.
Many of these hoodlums were born in France. They were the children of immigrants, not recent immigrants. To the extent that they are angry, it is about historical oppression, failed integration, and anti-colonialist ideology.
The police were undermanned because they underestimated what would happen. A few weeks ago Paris had 15k cops when the Pope visited. For these protests, Paris had 5k.
The far right just want to blame recent immigration, which had nothing to do with the protest nor violence. The left wants to pretend like immigration and race played no role.
The level of crime, breaking into stores, breaking into residences, rioting, destruction…was really bad. Way worse than recent comparisons.
France needs to make serious fiscal cuts, but the people would likely rebel if they tried it…so the country is kind of fucked, and if a political solution is not found, eventually the bond market will sink France.
Due to European military dependence on the US, Europe has been deferential to the US. They let the US use their land and facilities even for wars they disagreed with.
Defending Europe is not a driver of US spending. Europe spending more is good, but it won’t make the defense of the US and its interests cheaper. If the relationship is too damaged, it will make it more expensive.
“a company involved in its last renovation more than 15 years ago was approached with an opportunity to do this remodel as well. But the company said no.
Specifically, it balked at two requirements – the Trump administration wanted it done by July 4, and the pool bottom had to be blue, according to two employees with the New Jersey-based Sika Corporation, which provided the concrete construction and sealing products for a 2010 renovation project to the Reflecting Pool.
According to the two employees, who spoke to CNN on the condition they not be identified, both demands made the job “unfeasible.”
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It was initially estimated to cost $1.8 million, but the price tag is now up to $14.7 million
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Sika declined the proposal after a routine assessment of feasibility and risk, the employees said. One of the Sika specialists assumed that was because Sika’s solution was complicated and lengthy, not fitting the contractor’s tight timeline of just a few months turnaround.
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a journalist and former Republican communications strategist, Eddie Wood, who owns Atlantic Industrial Coatings, said it was the government that decided to use a type of plastic-like coating called polyurea and contract Rhino Linings to provide those materials.
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As for the Rhino 406 Primer, one Sika employee said that epoxy, which is a popular coating for garage floors, is rigid, and would not be a good solution for flexing joints like the ones in the Reflecting Pool.
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The last time Sika worked on the reflecting pool was in 2012, when President Barack Obama’s administration spent $34 million on an 18-month renovation of the pool which was meant to address ongoing issues with algae blooms.
However, shortly after that renovation was completed, the pool again became a murky, smelly mess. That apparent failure to adequately address the issues with the pool became political fodder for Trump when he ordered his own renovation.”
For a long time, a lot of people who really just wanted a smaller government pretended to care about debt (or fooled themselves into thinking they cared about debt).
Three quarters of US government spending make the federal government an insurance company with an army. As a percentage of the total spending, waste fraud and abuse is very small. DOGE was a failure because it didn’t understand the US federal government. If you want to significantly reduce spending, you have to stop sending Americans checks (like Medicare and Social Security), or/and have to weaken the military, although the check cutting part is much bigger than the military spending part.
Republican politicians used to lie, or be misinformed, by saying that tax cuts pay for themselves; now they lie, or are misinformed, by saying Trump won the 2020 election (he did not). It’s hard to make a tough compromise under such politics.
Young men don’t believe they have a future, they don’t trust institutions, and they don’t trust each other, so they feel that they need to get rich quick with a variety of ways to gamble. Most of them lose money, which could make their trust in society even worse.