by pessimizer | 2025-09-22 12:23:03+00:00
I'm starting to think that HNs soft prohibition against politics only applies to women and black people talking about their experiences in tech (disappeared.) At least four or five of these non-news items that just serve for endless anti-administration comments are hitting the front page every day. The Wikipedia page for goddamn Horst Wessel almost hit the front page last night, because according to people with George W. Bush's politics, everybody is a Nazi.

No, South Korea's new president saying something about an unfavorable trade treaty that hasn't happened yet is not news. Their last president declared martial law because he declared that the opposition party was subverted by Russian propaganda. The NYT, as they do, pretended not to know that it was wrong because US interests were hoping it would succeed.

And when you rail about how awful it was to raid a factory where Koreans on visas that didn't allow them to do physical work were doing physical work, and where one of them had been killed and another worker not from Korea cut in half in an accident; a site that was being reported over and over again for safety and workers rights violations, consider how that makes working people think of you.

Reference, notorious Nazi outlet The American Prospect: Following ICE Raid in Georgia, Concerns Raised About Human Trafficking at Hyundai https://prospect.org/justice/2025-09-08-ice-raid-georgia-pla...

Why do the outlets that you get your news from simply ignore things? Simply choose not to report on them? Instead we get "Somebody says something." You shouldn't see a story like that being reported as news unless there is nothing else going on. Israel is killing everyone in Gaza City right now.

But tariffs, though. Protectionism! Grover Norquist is smiling in Hell.

That being said, I understand that a lot of people are not from, in, or have any loyalty to the US. But US policy is not made for you. We've hollowed out our working population, and kept them alive with credit. America itself has to deleverage. AI is not going to save us, because it is stupid, and wringing productivity gains from it will be difficult and will not give us any relative advantage because it will be cheap to imitate. That's a couple trillion that we can expect to be wiped out in the very short term future. We need to take some medicine now (the wildly overvalued dollar has been our heroin for 50 years), and anyone who has been relying on US debt (whether in the form of US deficit spending on defense, or otherwise) to float their economies has to get off the teat.

We're a bad influence on SK anyway, and should never have been there. If they want to stop investing in the US they're free to, they're just going to feel it when they try to export to the US. If your economy will collapse when that happens, it's because your economy is making out better than our economy. Also, it's nothing like the IMF crisis to insist on a favorable trade deal. US elites have been bribed by ownership in foreign concerns not to insist. It'll still work - look at the people in office now, they love a bribe - but you have to renegotiate. That's how dirty business works; your counterparties are as trustworthy as the leverage you have over them. Nobody is going to cry over you being screwed because the people you bribed before are out of power.