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PRISMGPT


Palantir

Another Trump quote taken totally out of context. He was encouraging people who don't normally vote to get out and vote this time.

People who oppose Trump don't do themselves any favors by misrepresenting this stuff. The guy is a ghoul and says plenty of terrible things that don't need misrepresentation to make him look bad.


I suppose this is out of context, too? In reference to Clinton being elected:

> "If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks," he said at a rally in Wilmington, N.C., to boos from the crowd. "Although you Second Amendment people ... maybe there is, I don't know."


It seems like it has the necessary context and is without any sort of "misrepresentation".

Your reply explains the "You need to get out and vote" part, but it doesn't explain the "and if everything goes well, maybe you won't need to vote again" part. What context do you believe makes the 2nd part alright?


The country is in good enough shape that they can go back to not caring if it's a Democrat or Republican in the White House.


This perspective is willfully ignorant towards social issues.


And yet, that was probably what he meant.


Ok, that is also a valid interpretation


If you heard this quote without knowing who said it, you would think it is most likely that the speaker meant “vote again for me”. When a politician says “go vote”, it’s normally implied “go vote for me”.

In context, I think it is obvious that is what Trump meant. People that have been told Trump is a dictator that wants to end democracy obviously won’t approach that quote with normal grace they afford others.


Lets say you are right and the correct interpretation is:

"and if everything goes well, maybe you won't need to vote for me again"

Trump would be term limited, so they would not be able to vote him in as president again anyway. That is why this interpretation does not make sense to me.


It would just be a useful reminder of that fact. Remember: you're trying to sell voting to someone who doesn't normally vote. It's easier to sell it as being a one-off thing versus sell them on voting in all future elections.


> It's easier to sell it as being a one-off thing versus sell them on voting in all future elections.

So a promise to permanently and irrevocably change the country? If it is truly one off that is what it would have to be, which is not possible via normal legal mechanisms in the USA.


If one heard this quote without knowing who said it, they would think it is most likely that the speaker meant "If I win, I will make sure further consent of the governed, unnecessary", which is why the quote got the attention it did, and why, to my knowledge, no other US presidential candidate in the entire history of our nation has ever dared utter it.


> People that have been told Trump is a dictator

I can't imagine where they'd get that idea from. Certainly not from Trump saying he'd be a dictator on day one to close borders and a few other things. But not to worry, "after that, I won't be a dictator".


He will have fixed things to the point that voting someone else in won’t undo the good?


The DNC's #1 goal is to stop socialism in the primaries. A distant #2 is winning general elections.


Fun fact: Harris is the second-most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the Senate in the 21st century.

“During this period, there were 109 different Democrats who served in the Senate and cast a sufficient number of roll call votes for a reliable analysis of their ideological position. Of these 109 Democrats, Harris has the second-most liberal voting record. This makes her slightly less liberal than Warren, but more liberal than all of the remaining 107 Democrats, and significantly more liberal than all but a handful.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4816859-kamala-harris-i...


The definition of "liberal" being used here by The Hill is "voting with the Democratic Party". Their definitional left end of the spectrum is "bills put up by the Democrats" and definitional right end of the spectrum is "bills put up by the Republicans". These are not actually meaningfully "liberal" and "conservative" as the terms are used elsewhere.

Harris is a party-line voter (pretty obviously, as an insider she's defining the party line in the first place). The Democratic Party isn't leftist and nor is Harris. It's routine in most democracies for elected representatives to be party-line voters.


Liberalism and Socialism are two very different things. Liberalism is squarely in the Capitalism camp. There are no workers owning the means of production under Liberalism.

The DNC's bread and butter are Liberals. Not Socialists. Not anyone even approaching Socialist. Bernie, AOC, etc are SocDems at best. There are no Socialists in office in the United States.


I don’t disagree. I guess the DNC objective of stopping socialists in the primaries takes care of itself because there are no socialists in the party.


Goal #1 is just an instrumental goal to goal number #2. Socialists underperform moderates in general elections. Hell even Kamala, a terrible candidate who just got trounced by Trump outperformed Bernie (who has literally everything going for him) in his home state by a slim margin. Where as a moderate like Dan Osborn without the backing of the party outperformed Kamala by almost 14%.

Americans don't want to pay European style taxes even for European services. And our public sector is far less efficient than Europe's so we wouldn't even get European level of services for that taxation rate.


>The DNC's #1 goal is to stop socialism in the primaries.

"The DNC's #1 goal is to stop democracy in the primaries."

FTFY.


Because at some point, you need domestically-owned manufacturing as a matter of national security.


Exactly, the US already have a functional domestic semiconductor production, covering pretty much everything you'd need. It's much cheaper to protect and maintain that, compared to trying to revive or create a production line, like the EU is.


I don't buy it, it's not like the military needs the latest bleeding edge semiconductors out there.

If they do, they shouldn't rely on publicly traded companies and put them on support line on taxpayer's money.


Billionaires should not exist.


> Billionaires should not exist.

I'm ok with them, but they should not use their money against the rest of us.

Because when we pay for their wealth, then there is an accounting step missing somewhere.


No, they absolutely should exist. Capitalism raises everyone.


> Capitalism raises everyone

hopefully this is sarcasm


Every major communist country has been left in the dust by capitalist ones. Poverty is at a historical low.

We have gone from people dying from starvation to complaining that not everyone can buy a house. Nearly everyone has a universally connected borderline supercomputer in their pocket.


> complaining that not everyone can buy a house

In my ex-Soviet country you were guaranteed to get a free apartment provided by the government. Everyone I know who lived in a city got one, right up to 1991. All you needed to do was to register in a queue and wait for a few years (2-5 depending on several factors like family status — single moms were prioritized, for example). Now we're complaining that "not everyone" can buy an apartment (forget a house), just like you. Not just "not everyone", it's out of reach for most people, and things keep getting worse. At least we have jeans and burgers instead, I guess.


Housing is the cause of 90% of the problems in the west, and that's driven by democratic policies to restrict the supply, not by capitalism.


Yeah. Capitalism would have built a ton the types of apartments the GP is talking about if they were allowed. But, people who already have a place don't want that type of development near them.


Poverty has indeed been decreasing most places, but your framing is very misleading. Half of the people on earth still live on less than $7/day in 2017 PPP dollars, and they are not universally connected or supercomputing. Over 8% of the global population is still below the $2.15/day PPP threshold that defines “extreme poverty”, which means it’s not enough money to purchase enough food to survive, literally still dying from starvation. Note that’s around twice the population of the US. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/march-2023-global-po...


I'm not disagreeing with you that people are definitely struggling, but it's hard to see numbers like what you present w/o also numbers on what it cost to live per day. Is it an extreme case of CA vs WV or is it like someone making $7/day living in CA?


This isn’t primarily the US, this is global extreme poverty, and right now for example, it’s bad in Southern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, among one or two other places the UN & World Bank talk about.

> w/o also numbers on what it cost to live per day.

This is what “PPP” is all about, that’s referring to a normalized purchasing power parity that is specifically designed to help you understand what $7/day actually means: it means what you think it does, and it is supposed to compare directly to the amount of money it costs you to feed yourself every day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity


Communism is so terrible as a system of government that the U.S. has seen fit to forcefully intervene every time it’s been attempted.

Everyone is free to their own opinions, of course – and I’m not wholesale defending communism as it has been attempted – but I find it odd that something which is supposedly so awful can’t just be left alone to wither on the vine, and prove their point.


> Communism is so terrible as a system of government that the U.S. has seen fit to forcefully intervene every time it’s been attempted.

not exactly

the US and communist Russia were allies in WW2; the US did intervene in Korea and Vietnam but that was about maintaining a global edge over Russia -- Americans didn't give a fuck about whether it was good or bad for the people of Vietnam

Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan were communist.

Chile and Nicaragua are examples of when the US intervened to overthrough a democratically elected communist government.


You forgot Cuba.


Right, Cuba. The tiny island the US is obsessed about.

Cuba actually outperforms its non-communist former slave colony neighbors (Jamaica, DR, Haiti), which is especially impressive considering the never-ending sanctions from the US.


This is a ridiculous mix of statements! I don't care how many people have 'supercomputer' in their pockets. On other hand homelessness is rampant in USA/Canada and that's a major fail of the capitalism.


>On other hand homelessness is rampant in USA/Canada and that's a major fail of the capitalism.

Meanwhile in capitalist China[1], they're so great at building homes that there are entire cities with barely anyone living in them, "ghost cities". Insofar as a tight housing market contributes to homelessness, it's clear that it's caused by US/Canada specific factors (eg. NIMBYism, building codes, and environmental regulations) than capitalism.

[1] Even though ostensibly it's "socialist with chinese characteristics", for all intents and purposes the real estate sector is capitalist.


there isn't a problem with homelessness in China

but you are right that the capitalist market does restrict the supply of housing because people buy them as investments

also, the ghost cities is way overblown -- they just took time to fill up


Homelessness due to mental illness and drug addiction

Fentanyl and meth imported from China and other countries

EDIT: For naive downvoters. It is an observable fact. Drugs are destroying people and causing homelessness. I have witnessed it first hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5AeGKSDVdE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwlIAjcYypA

Look up "Philadelphia zombies"


rejecting capitalism doesn't equal embracing communism -- esp not communism as implemented in Russia and China

the main reason why the US became the uncontested power of the 20th century was WW1 and WW2

the socialist policies implemented by FDR saved the capitalism by making it less capitalist


They give back through their charities and foundations. How would you cope with your life without their charities?


Billionaire philanthropy is just another tax-free way oligarchs manipulate our society.


How dare they "manipulate our society by"... reducing malaria and fighting climate change. We'd be far better off if we relied on our ineffectual and corrupt (in case of malaria) governments to do it instead.


If all charities were net-good I would tend to agree with you, but they’re not.


How do you define "net-good"? One man's YIMBY charity to make housing more affordable is another's astroturf operation to destroy neighborhoods so real estate developers can make a quick buck.


It's a tax dodge.


How does this tax dodge work?



OK, so rather than giving $50m to the government they give $100m to charity?

On the surface this seems reasonable. Give $50k gift to your local wildlife sancturary for example, and get invited to the annual fundraising meal.

Looks like the big loopholes involve things like 501(c)(4)s

Without spending too long trying to workout the loopholes, it seems the larger problem is with the definition of a charity in the first place?


>OK, so rather than giving $50m to the government they give $100m to charity?

Any income the government doesn't collect is made up for by the middle and lower class and/or more debt which increases inflation, which is mainly a middle and lower class burden.

For a guy who claims everyone should pay their fair share, he sure takes advantage of a lot of loopholes which he probably helped pay to have written.

He's an OG corporate raider and should be thought of as such, rather than a benevolent capitalist.


I'm not that far gone, but I am very selective about when I buy ice cream, because my fat ass will just eat it all within 2-3 days. Cannot have it around regularly.


If you just make a post about healthcare in the USA being awful, it's highly likely to be removed/booted off the front page. Call it a "right to repair", though, and you're hitting the sweet spot for HN.


PSLF = Giving away 10 years of your prime at cut-rate

I believe in public service, but PSLF is just another way student loans distort the labor market & stifle competition and innovation.


Buffett just sold for an enormous profit while the market was trending near all-time highs.

Selling near all time highs = being fearful while others are being greedy.


And he now has a hefty amount in cash, so if things go bad, he can buy Low again, and enjoy another rally to the previous highs.

If not, then he has enough cash to buy/support the next big thing.


This isn't hard. The American middle class is disappearing.


Or the devices are just lasting longer.


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