No, it’s not a certainty that Trump’s policies will cause a recession. What if we get hit by a giant meteor before then, wiping out humanity before the tariffs have a chance to do any damage? Or if God finally decides He has had enough and exercises His Ultimate Recall Vote on Trump and his presidency tomorrow?

There is one thing I can predict: if Trump’s policies tank our economy. He will blame everyone but himself.

I found the perfect way to not get banned from Reddit: simply don’t go there.

Add Kazakhstan and they can be R-BUICKS

Then Trump will personally invite Putin and Russia into a special “Friendship Union” with the US. We can call it FU2…

… for now. If a President wanted to destroy the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, he would do all the things Trump is doing right now.

This particular decline was caused by a bunch of insiders, including one greedy pigboy, selling some of their shares.

That’s not necessarily a sign of any problems at the company, though. These insiders are probably carrying this equity from before it ever went public and sell shares periodically as part of their (insane) compensation. For instance, the aforementioned greedy little pigboy sold $2m according to that article, but still holds more than $90m at current valuations.

Ah, on this point I think you are incorrect. Since there are exchanges all over the world actively trading between crypto and their local currencies, crypto provides an interesting route around the currency exchanges.

If the Dollar (and only the dollar) tanks with respect to other conventional currencies, it’s very likely to tank vs. Crypto as well, because those Crypto holders can easily choose to buy Euros or Yen or whatever with their crypto instead.

I actually think this is the end goal with Trump’s Strategic Shitcoin Reserve: sell dollars for crypto, tank the dollar, buy back dollars with crypto…

The original promise of crypto was as a distributed, peer-to-peer way to transact, without the permission of any third party. Think Paypal or Venmo, but without having to trust Paypal and Venmo with your bank details. And when the price of BTC was a few hundred dollars, people were slowly using it to transact. But then, the price started to climb. And that was the worst possible thing to happen to Crypto, because now people started considering it to be an “investment” and too precious to spend. (BTC developers even deliberately kept their on-chain transactions expensive, to push their off-chain solution for small transactions, but That’s a whole different post).

There are coins that are still good as currency, they’re just not a good “investment” so they don’t get attention. (Some Monero shill will be along shortly to tell us how awesome XMR is.)

I spent a lot of time in the crypto space, not as a “true believer”, but rather as someone who wanted to know how it all worked. And I’ve concluded that crypto really does enable trustless transactions. However, I’ve convinced myself that nobody (outside of the extreme libertarians) actually wants that. Your average Joe doesn’t care that PayPal, Google, or their credit card company is spying on (and perhaps taking a piece of) all their transactions. They want something that is easy to use, and whose value doesn’t fluctuate with Elon Musk’s tweets.

Side note: what is the “proper” Ukranian way to transliterate Зеленський? I’ve seen “sky”, “skiy”, and “skyy” in the media. I note Wikipedia uses “skyy”. I know that there may not be a single direct transliteration, but perhaps Ukranians prefer one particular transliteration over another?

I think it’s a trap. Zelenskiy knows that the rare earths are difficult to mine profitably. If he had signed it, it would just give Trump cover to claim that Ukraine was not holding up its end of the deal in a few years, and withdraw from whatever agreement was made.

Zelenskiy knows it’s only a matter of time before US support for Ukraine goes away. His job is to push whatever levers he has to keep the support flowing for as long as possible, while arranging more support from Europe.

The Trump administration is entirely transactional. They will not do anything for anyone unless they are getting something back in exchange. However, it is also very performative. Trump cares more about the optics of a deal than the deal itself. How many times have you heard Trump talk about his own or someone else’s “ratings”? He’s not talking about any objective metric, he is talking about popularity.

So, it entirely makes sense that his aim was to publicly humiliate Zelenskiy and force him into a “deal” with lots of “value” coming back to the US. As long as the press can report a high number in the deal, the terms of the deal are not important. Trump could care less whether the deal was for minerals, or anything else. He cares more about the headlines that the deal would bring then the terms of the deal itself.

And since it’s quite likely that he is aligned wih Russia, making a deal that is difficult to technically deliver on with Ukraine may be purposeful. It would give him cover at some point to complain “Ukraine isn’t living up to the terms of this deal”, because the terms may be unattainable. However, I don’t think Trump thinks that far ahead, he’s only concerned with today’s headlines. He may be getting coached on that by his Russian friends on how to appease domestic critics while putting Ukraine in a lose-lose situation.

Isn’t it obvious? Harris is running for Governor, because Newsom is running for President.

Which will be hilarious if Trump Jr. also runs for President, because his (former) long-time fiancee was also Newsom’s ex-wife. Kimberly Guilfoyle will be hitting the interview circuit big-time as the ex-partner of both candidates.

Welcome!

In an epic theatrical rap battle? Actually, I’d pay to see that…

I dont think it’s kind to heckle Tesla owners. But I do admit I laugh out loud every time I see a Cybertruck. They’re that silly.

If Republicans believe this, they should pass a bill obligating the President to send more support to Ukraine. I bet that would get enough support from both parties to get past the inevitable Presidential veto. Then, they should hold his feet to the fire and impeach his ass again if he impounds the money.

They won’t do any of this, because “moral clarity” takes a back seat to avoiding a Musk-funded primary challenge for their seat in the next election.

He’s gonna start calling them the “Woke Street Journal”, isn’t he?

“The longer this disruption lasts, the more the system will break,”

Yes. That’s why they did it.

The irony is that he was very interested in the civil rights movement as a student. (And let’s face it, this is not surprising for a Black student from the late 60’s/early 70’s.) And he was a bright student, he got accepted unto many law schools and was one of only 12 black law students at Yale. He’s not a moron.

And when he graduated from Yale, and sought a job in private practice, he found that law firms assumed he must have gotten his degree because of affirmative action, and not on his merit. So, having experienced systemic racism firsthand, he sought to root it out everywhere…

… Sike! That’s not it at all. Rather than blame the racist law partners who assumed nobody with that much melanin could graduate from Yale without help, he blamed Yale for giving him a “worthless degree” with the taint of affirmative action all over it, and embarked on a career dedicated to tearing down anything that would help minority groups. No wonder Republicans like him so much.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas