His stated aversion to interest rates is religious and it causes economic divide.
IMO, US might be on the same path albeit slower. This might become a revolving door if the calculation/facts from other sources continues to be bad. And once Jerome Powell leaves interest rates cuts will be pushed through making things worse.
“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”
From the excellent "Why Nations Fail" by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson:
> An example of what could happen if you took your job too seriously,
rather than successfully second-guessing what the Communist Party
wanted, is provided by the Soviet census of 1937. As the returns came
in, it became clear that they would show a population of about 162
million, far less than the 180 million Stalin had anticipated and indeed
below the figure of 168 million that Stalin himself announced in 1934.
The 1937 census was the first conducted since 1926, and therefore the
first one that followed the mass famines and purges of the early 1930s.
The accurate population numbers reflected this. Stalin's response was to
have those who organized the census arrested and sent to Siberia or
shot. He ordered another census, which took place in 1939. This time the
organizers got it right; they found that the population was actually 171
million.
It is also hilarious that during the Biden admin "numbers were initially high and then revised down" was seen as fraud to make the Biden admin look good while now "numbers were initially high and then revised down" is seen as fraud to make the Trump admin look bad. Ridiculous.
What puzzles me is after all the accusations of "stealing the election", why did people not put the election results under extra scrutiny and demand access to details of the voting machines anti-tampering technology? Trump has said things that hinted at Musk maybe altering voting machines/counts, so why has this not been followed up?
The part of "small govt." is reaching into all sorts of businesses and directing them what to do and what not to do. (Amazon, Google, Apple, even the Smithsonian !)
Also, the deals he is trying to do with countries are... weird to say the least. Often it requires the country to buy Boeing airplanes. With Japan, it was 100.
Like, how do you even manage to meet that goal if the country don't have a state-owned airline? It feels for me, Trump thinks every country is either a dictatorship or a state capitalism.
Lost part of his base? What because of the Epstein stuff? You new here or something? If history is a guide, any drop in support among the base is temporary. They just need a few more weeks to get comfortable with the mental gymnastics they’ll use to spin this to themselves as being Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton’s fault and then Trump’s base support will be right back where it was.
An April 2025 episode from Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, "Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying":
> Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even harder. People aren't responding to surveys like they used to. Survey responses have also become a lot more divided along political lines. And at the same time, the Trump administration wants to cut back on government spending, and the worry is that fewer official resources will make tracking the US economy even harder for statistical departments that were already stretched. Bill Beach was commissioner of labor statistics and head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics during Trump's first presidency and also during President Biden's. On this episode, we talk to him about the importance of official data and why the rails for economic data are deteriorating so quickly.
William ("Bill") Beach was the head of the BLS of the before the just-fired head; he was Trump-appointed and Heritage Foundation fellow, and not a fan of the firing:
> The totally groundless firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS, sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau. For a full statement opposing this move, read: https://www.friendsofbls.org/updates/2025/8/1/statement-on-c...
Also, from 2023, "Houston, We Have a Data Problem":
> The concerns are laid bare in a recently published report from the National Academy of Sciences. It includes a table showing that response rates to household surveys for basic information such as the current population survey (CPS) undertaken by the Census Bureau and the housing portion of CPI (a crucial input for overall inflation) have drifted down dramatically in recent years. The housing survey, for instance, used to get responses from about two-thirds of those surveyed. It now gets just half.
The voters clearly voted for Trump to do whatever he wants. They voted for him to thoroughly realign the government to follow his policy and his narrative, to root out the "deep state". Obviously anyone who publishes numbers that look bad is trying to undermine him. How many of his voters disagree with this agenda?
> Trump said: "Christians, get out and vote, just this time. "You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians."
He's talking to people who don't normally pay attention to politics, but are now because of the economic problems they're facing. He's saying once he fixes those problems, they can go back to not paying attention to politics.
> He's talking to people who don't normally pay attention to politics ... He's saying once he fixes those problems, they can go back to not paying attention to politics.
From 2015:
> Based on my research, Christians are much more likely to vote than non-Christians.
They worry about, and elect political representatives that try to act on, schoolchildren that identify as cats and have litter boxes in classrooms for them.
Rather lacking in any sense whatsoever, just repeating random lies like truth.
On the other side of the political spectrum, they might also get up in arms because federal officials in remote areas use horses to travel in rough terrain, off road.
It's not limited to one side,though I'd say quite tilted.
Since they've been told climate change is a hoax, republican voters in the US have needed an explanation for the dramatic increase in the frequency/severity of severe weather events. They have flocked to the conspiracy theory that Democrats are using geo engineering to manipulate the weather for political ends and to make climate change "real".
Lest you dismiss this as the folly of the very online, states are passing laws against weather manipulation in response.
So? There is zero reason for Trump and the GOP not to do this, it has worked great to keep the leaders of those countries in power. It frankly surprises me previous presidents had not been as shameless at using their power like this. Unless you believe operating like this what makes Russia or North Korea poorer than the USA, which I think is very dubious.
It generally hasn't worked out great for anyone else, though. The obvious modern parallel is Turkey, where Erdogan, rather than dealing with bad numbers, just faked the numbers. And forced down interest rates. Today, Turkey's inflation rate is 35%, though in fairness that's a decent reduction from the nearly 100% it was seeing a couple years ago.
I think one of the reasons the USSR centrally planned economy failed was because they couldn’t get accurate data from satellite sources, meaning there was no chance to make good decisions.
> Unless you believe operating like this what makes Russia or North Korea poorer than the USA, which I think is very dubious.
Rejecting people who look at reality with people who tell the leader what they want to hear is a big part of why Russia and North Korea are so less successful than the US, yeah. I don’t think that’s dubious, or even uncertain.
It's funny and telling you believe we don't get propaganda. They are doing a really good job!
But think about it… according to our media russia was out of weapons and food 3 years ago. How did ukraine not invade moscow if the russians are all dead?
It's complicated. I've lived in an eastern European communist country, escaped as a political refugee, and then lived in several western countries.
Communist countries at least could house everyone. They more or less had to, because most of them are too cold in winter for the homeless to survive. Education was generally free and quite good. Etc...
But... my dad was dragged off one day and beaten black and blue by the secret police for engaging in "anti-communist capitalist activities". He was tutoring students after school for a bit of cash.
Meanwhile, in the world's richest third-world country, the United States, people with the wrong skin colour are being dragged out of their homes and thrown into concentration camps in another country. Breaking a leg can bankrupt you.
You hear stories of NK refugees hating their new life in SK because it's too competitive and they can't keep up with the constant go-go-go business culture.
I also saw smuggled(!) videos of children in NK picking up individual grains of rice that fell in between the railway tracks at the local shunting yard. So you know... hustle culture, or that.
I personally remember driving to a shopping centre and standing in line outside right before it opened so my Mom could buy me rain boots. Her friend that worked there had called her at 6am telling her to hurry because they had them in stock for the first (and only) time that year.
But... on my recent holiday to the US I was shocked to see how tense police officers looked compared to anywhere else in the world. I witnessed a traffic accident, and the cops that turned up looked like they were ready to draw their weapons and start blasting at any second. They were all kitted out in body armour and had their hands on their weapons at all times. Scanning the crowd non-stop. Where I live, cops are friendly and will high-five my kid and pose for selfies. The US feels more like an outdoor prison to me.
Cops in the US are given military hardware in many cases and are trained to see anyone as a threat, an opponent. And there are enough criminal f-heads in any state and region to kinda justify that in the aggregate. We're well-armed, and there are a lot of nut jobs. But not the majority by any means.
> I witnessed a traffic accident, and they cops that turned up looked like they were ready to draw their weapons
Traffic stops are one of the most high risk situations police officers are involved in. I imagine traffic accidents are up there with it. The US also has a road rage problem topped off by never knowing who is armed or who keeps a revolver in the glove box
You're repeating the propaganda that is used to put cops on edge and make them trigger happy. There is a long list of jobs that are more dangerous than cop in the US. They hype themselves up that they're in danger all the time and citizens pay the price.
1659447091 did not compare Police Officer’s jobs with other jobs but merely pointed out that traffic stops are dangerous for them. Imagine if part of the job involved a 0.3% possibility of getting killed, how would you approach that part of the job?
I have a lead foot sometimes, and I've had a gun waved (but not pointed, thankfully) at me at least twice that I'm aware of in recent years (Houston area)
Try showing a palestinian flag or an anti monarchy piece of paper in the very civilised and liberal UK and see what happens to you in the totally free western world.
> From how it’s stated, I would expect on the order of at least 5% of non-whites to be imprisoned.
Based on current demographic numbers, you would require almost 7 million people to be imprisoned before you'll accept that authorities are targeting minorities? That's more than 3x the current numbers and 60% of the global incarcerated population.
You're not being intellectually honest with that argument.
"Today, a federal court found that the federal government’s ongoing immigration raids in Southern California and its denial of access to counsel for arrested immigrants likely violated the Constitution, and issued two temporary restraining orders (TRO) prohibiting the federal government, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), from continuing its unlawful actions in Los Angeles and surrounding counties.
The first TRO bars immigration agents from stopping individuals without reasonable suspicion and from relying on four factors – alone or in combination – including apparent race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or English with an accent; presence in a particular location like a bus stop, car wash, or agricultural site; or the work the person does. The second TRO orders DHS to provide access to counsel on weekdays, weekends, and holidays for people who are detained in B-18, the federal building in downtown Los Angeles."[0]
"A federal judge in California has temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s administration from revoking deportation protections for tens of thousands of immigrants from Honduras, Nepal and Nicaragua.
A searing 37-page ruling argued that a decision by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to cancel those temporary humanitarian protections appeared partially rooted in “racial and discriminatory animus.”
“Color is neither a poison nor a crime,” stated the ruling from District Judge Trina Thompson, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden."[1]
They have a set process. This is reading tea leaves. The numbers were revised up under Biden and down under Trump. "Clearly this is manipulation based on the fact that it makes me look bad". Said the charlatan.
HN leans a bit to the right due to it being mostly male and tech oriented, which tend to lean libertarian. If that isn’t enough of a safe space for you, your views might be a farther from center than you think
Ah yes, Woke Combinator, the indefatigably progressive bastion, where the innocent are gulagged and a stifling political agenda is imposed by stalinist VC apparatchiks.
This is definitely a valid perspective supported by fact
The jobs data comes from surveys of businesses and consumers. Fewer of each category are responding, continuing a long-term trend of declining response rates. Cuts affect their ability to collect data with about 15% of the sample "suspended" -- i.e. not done "to align survey workload with resource levels" in the words of the announcement linked from the Bloomberg article.
> "The more data you’re missing and comes in later, the higher the odds the revisions will be much larger," said Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights LLC. "Fifty percent is just not enough."
> BLS surveys firms in the payrolls survey over the course of three months, gaining a more complete picture as more businesses respond. But a smaller share of firms are responding to the first poll. Initial collection rates have repeatedly slid below 60% in recent months — down from the roughly 70% or more that was the norm before the pandemic.
> “The more data you’re missing and comes in later, the higher the odds the revisions will be much larger,” said Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights LLC. “Fifty percent is just not enough.”
[…]
> “We are seeing these cuts to funding for government agencies affect their ability to collect and analyze economic data,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon. “And for all of the reports that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is conducting, there is likely to be more volatility going forward.”
From William Beach, the Trump-appointed predecessor to the just-fired chief (and Heritage Foundation fellow):
> The totally groundless firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS, sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau. For a full statement opposing this move, read: https://www.friendsofbls.org/updates/2025/8/1/statement-on-c...
Beach was on an April 2025 episode from Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, "Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying":
> Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even harder. People aren't responding to surveys like they used to. Survey responses have also become a lot more divided along political lines. And at the same time, the Trump administration wants to cut back on government spending, and the worry is that fewer official resources will make tracking the US economy even harder for statistical departments that were already stretched. Bill Beach was commissioner of labor statistics and head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics during Trump's first presidency and also during President Biden's. On this episode, we talk to him about the importance of official data and why the rails for economic data are deteriorating so quickly.
I voted for Trump and am not a fan of this. He's been doing a ton of terrible stuff the past few weeks. Very disappointing. Definitely liked the first few months he was in office.
Sure that's fine. It looked like we were getting a downturn of some sort this year no matter what the government did anyway just based off the debt term structure.
Are you kidding? This is the type of thing Tr*mp has always done. He occupied the office before, remember? I swear no one remembers the disaster that was 2016-2020. I don't know how anyone could forget. Historians ranked him the 3rd worst presidential term ever.
> It looked like we were getting a downturn of some sort this year no matter what the government did anyway just based off the debt term structure.
Who was predicting a downturn in 2025? What predictions of a downturn were being published in December 2024?
The fact of the matter is is that the numbers at the 2024 were looking great:
> Trump hammered the administration for creating an “economic catastrophe,” but some of his favorite gauges for assessing economic performance have been humming.
So you voted for tariffs by voting for Trump, and by voting for tariffs you voted for economic instability. There was nothing in the pre-Trump policies and economic thinking that would have caused an economic downturn.
Further, you voted for the gutting and privatization government functions:
The mental gymnastic of a MAGA supporter. Shocked by the guy who wouldn't accept that he was wrong about the weather and drew a new path with a sharpie. These guys don't like the weather for Chrissake and blame the "other side"!
> downturn of some sort this year no matter what the government did anyway just based off the debt term structure
But I guess not far from the mental gymnastic of "this is not happening due to flip flopping on tariffs".
I am sure as things get worse many people will use this same excuse of "But I didn't know he was going to do this" excuse to distance themselves for the mess which is coming.
From 2022, "Turkey’s Erdogan Fires Statistics Chief After Record Inflation":
* https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/turkeys-erdogan-fires-...
* https://archive.is/https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/tur...
Turkey is a good example here.
Erdogan had also fired the Central Bank Chief when he refused to lower the interest rates: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48891658
and then kept firing: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/middle-east/turkeys-er...
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/the-last-straw-why-...
His stated aversion to interest rates is religious and it causes economic divide.
IMO, US might be on the same path albeit slower. This might become a revolving door if the calculation/facts from other sources continues to be bad. And once Jerome Powell leaves interest rates cuts will be pushed through making things worse.
> IMO, US might be on the same path albeit slower.
Hasn't the US been speed running this for the past six months?
Worth to point out that he then manages to lower the interest rates by force, and then, surprise, inflation skyrockets.
“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”
From the excellent "Why Nations Fail" by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson:
> An example of what could happen if you took your job too seriously, rather than successfully second-guessing what the Communist Party wanted, is provided by the Soviet census of 1937. As the returns came in, it became clear that they would show a population of about 162 million, far less than the 180 million Stalin had anticipated and indeed below the figure of 168 million that Stalin himself announced in 1934. The 1937 census was the first conducted since 1926, and therefore the first one that followed the mass famines and purges of the early 1930s. The accurate population numbers reflected this. Stalin's response was to have those who organized the census arrested and sent to Siberia or shot. He ordered another census, which took place in 1939. This time the organizers got it right; they found that the population was actually 171 million.
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> Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes
Immediately attempts to manipulate them for political purposes.
It is also hilarious that during the Biden admin "numbers were initially high and then revised down" was seen as fraud to make the Biden admin look good while now "numbers were initially high and then revised down" is seen as fraud to make the Trump admin look bad. Ridiculous.
Every accusation is an admission.
What puzzles me is after all the accusations of "stealing the election", why did people not put the election results under extra scrutiny and demand access to details of the voting machines anti-tampering technology? Trump has said things that hinted at Musk maybe altering voting machines/counts, so why has this not been followed up?
He will only look into to it if the results don't go his way.
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Discussions (42 points, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44760734
(23 points, 12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44760951
& https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44761019 (53 points, 19 comments)
This is beyond reason ... killing the messenger is never acceptable!
We as a country are so unserious. I just can't anymore.
He's lost a substantial part of his base, and now appears to be losing his mind.
I highly doubt that.
The part of "small govt." is reaching into all sorts of businesses and directing them what to do and what not to do. (Amazon, Google, Apple, even the Smithsonian !)
What did they direct Apple, Google, and Amazon to do?
Trump directed Amazon to stop displaying itemized bill with tariff rates. Amazon folded in a few hours.
Trump has directed Apple to start producing equipment in America multiple times.
Trump has directed Google to refine its search results and AI results in line with Party views.
Edit : Trump also directed Apple and Google to stop hiring Indians.
look at his opinion on h1bs flipping. its a cover
Also directed pretty much every company to drop DEI.
Also, the deals he is trying to do with countries are... weird to say the least. Often it requires the country to buy Boeing airplanes. With Japan, it was 100.
Like, how do you even manage to meet that goal if the country don't have a state-owned airline? It feels for me, Trump thinks every country is either a dictatorship or a state capitalism.
Lost part of his base? What because of the Epstein stuff? You new here or something? If history is a guide, any drop in support among the base is temporary. They just need a few more weeks to get comfortable with the mental gymnastics they’ll use to spin this to themselves as being Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton’s fault and then Trump’s base support will be right back where it was.
An April 2025 episode from Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, "Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying":
> Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even harder. People aren't responding to surveys like they used to. Survey responses have also become a lot more divided along political lines. And at the same time, the Trump administration wants to cut back on government spending, and the worry is that fewer official resources will make tracking the US economy even harder for statistical departments that were already stretched. Bill Beach was commissioner of labor statistics and head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics during Trump's first presidency and also during President Biden's. On this episode, we talk to him about the importance of official data and why the rails for economic data are deteriorating so quickly.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfgpqVixeIw
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...
* https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...
William ("Bill") Beach was the head of the BLS of the before the just-fired head; he was Trump-appointed and Heritage Foundation fellow, and not a fan of the firing:
> The totally groundless firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS, sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau. For a full statement opposing this move, read: https://www.friendsofbls.org/updates/2025/8/1/statement-on-c...
* https://twitter.com/BeachWW453/status/1951376029060055506#m
Also, from 2023, "Houston, We Have a Data Problem":
> The concerns are laid bare in a recently published report from the National Academy of Sciences. It includes a table showing that response rates to household surveys for basic information such as the current population survey (CPS) undertaken by the Census Bureau and the housing portion of CPI (a crucial input for overall inflation) have drifted down dramatically in recent years. The housing survey, for instance, used to get responses from about two-thirds of those surveyed. It now gets just half.
* https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletter...
This is USSR / North Korea stuff
It's USA stuff now. The voters spoke. Remember, they won't need to vote again. That's the promise.
I didn't understand anyone voting for that in particular.
Policy questions of all sorts, we can all discuss: that's called democracy.
But when someone promises to end your participation, you have surrendered all agency to them which has never worked out well in history.
The voters clearly voted for Trump to do whatever he wants. They voted for him to thoroughly realign the government to follow his policy and his narrative, to root out the "deep state". Obviously anyone who publishes numbers that look bad is trying to undermine him. How many of his voters disagree with this agenda?
> That's the promise
[Citation needed]
July 28, 2024:
> Trump said: "Christians, get out and vote, just this time. "You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians."
Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-tells-christians-they...
And the video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Y7b4r1FIG-A
He's talking to people who don't normally pay attention to politics, but are now because of the economic problems they're facing. He's saying once he fixes those problems, they can go back to not paying attention to politics.
> He's talking to people who don't normally pay attention to politics ... He's saying once he fixes those problems, they can go back to not paying attention to politics.
From 2015:
> Based on my research, Christians are much more likely to vote than non-Christians.
https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&...
Are U.S. voters really that stupid?
They worry about, and elect political representatives that try to act on, schoolchildren that identify as cats and have litter boxes in classrooms for them. Rather lacking in any sense whatsoever, just repeating random lies like truth. On the other side of the political spectrum, they might also get up in arms because federal officials in remote areas use horses to travel in rough terrain, off road. It's not limited to one side,though I'd say quite tilted.
Since they've been told climate change is a hoax, republican voters in the US have needed an explanation for the dramatic increase in the frequency/severity of severe weather events. They have flocked to the conspiracy theory that Democrats are using geo engineering to manipulate the weather for political ends and to make climate change "real".
Lest you dismiss this as the folly of the very online, states are passing laws against weather manipulation in response.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/republicans-p...
So uh yeah, really that stupid. At least enough of them to be statistically relevant in a two-party system.
Yes. Education, critical thinking are not a priority.
You will note that business leaders, especially the tech ones like marca, Thiel, Zuckerberg, cheer this on too.
Has been for a very long time. Consider the Rule of Seven[1] against the historical data.
[1] https://www.brainbok.com/guide/pm-study-notes/rule-of-seven-...
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If you're not worried the leading democracy in the world is looking for yes men, you should.
You mean Iceland? I hadn't heard that
I meant the country that leads the world and is also a democracy, but you knew that before you commented.
I don't think anyone is leading the world anymore -- you might need to clear your cache and install the multipolar DLC
Trump specifically claimed that the numbers were rigged to make Republicans and him look bad. He of course offers no evidence for this.
That's very much like a USSR or North Korean way of doing things.
So? There is zero reason for Trump and the GOP not to do this, it has worked great to keep the leaders of those countries in power. It frankly surprises me previous presidents had not been as shameless at using their power like this. Unless you believe operating like this what makes Russia or North Korea poorer than the USA, which I think is very dubious.
It generally hasn't worked out great for anyone else, though. The obvious modern parallel is Turkey, where Erdogan, rather than dealing with bad numbers, just faked the numbers. And forced down interest rates. Today, Turkey's inflation rate is 35%, though in fairness that's a decent reduction from the nearly 100% it was seeing a couple years ago.
I think one of the reasons the USSR centrally planned economy failed was because they couldn’t get accurate data from satellite sources, meaning there was no chance to make good decisions.
> Unless you believe operating like this what makes Russia or North Korea poorer than the USA, which I think is very dubious.
Rejecting people who look at reality with people who tell the leader what they want to hear is a big part of why Russia and North Korea are so less successful than the US, yeah. I don’t think that’s dubious, or even uncertain.
I struggle to believe they're as bad as our propaganda wants us to believe.
This is a statement of fact that you're referring to as propaganda.
It's funny and telling you believe we don't get propaganda. They are doing a really good job!
But think about it… according to our media russia was out of weapons and food 3 years ago. How did ukraine not invade moscow if the russians are all dead?
Could it be… because it was propaganda?
It's complicated. I've lived in an eastern European communist country, escaped as a political refugee, and then lived in several western countries.
Communist countries at least could house everyone. They more or less had to, because most of them are too cold in winter for the homeless to survive. Education was generally free and quite good. Etc...
But... my dad was dragged off one day and beaten black and blue by the secret police for engaging in "anti-communist capitalist activities". He was tutoring students after school for a bit of cash.
Meanwhile, in the world's richest third-world country, the United States, people with the wrong skin colour are being dragged out of their homes and thrown into concentration camps in another country. Breaking a leg can bankrupt you.
You hear stories of NK refugees hating their new life in SK because it's too competitive and they can't keep up with the constant go-go-go business culture.
I also saw smuggled(!) videos of children in NK picking up individual grains of rice that fell in between the railway tracks at the local shunting yard. So you know... hustle culture, or that.
I personally remember driving to a shopping centre and standing in line outside right before it opened so my Mom could buy me rain boots. Her friend that worked there had called her at 6am telling her to hurry because they had them in stock for the first (and only) time that year.
But... on my recent holiday to the US I was shocked to see how tense police officers looked compared to anywhere else in the world. I witnessed a traffic accident, and the cops that turned up looked like they were ready to draw their weapons and start blasting at any second. They were all kitted out in body armour and had their hands on their weapons at all times. Scanning the crowd non-stop. Where I live, cops are friendly and will high-five my kid and pose for selfies. The US feels more like an outdoor prison to me.
Cops in the US are given military hardware in many cases and are trained to see anyone as a threat, an opponent. And there are enough criminal f-heads in any state and region to kinda justify that in the aggregate. We're well-armed, and there are a lot of nut jobs. But not the majority by any means.
Doesn't the USA have more guns per capita than nations at war?
> I witnessed a traffic accident, and they cops that turned up looked like they were ready to draw their weapons
Traffic stops are one of the most high risk situations police officers are involved in. I imagine traffic accidents are up there with it. The US also has a road rage problem topped off by never knowing who is armed or who keeps a revolver in the glove box
You're repeating the propaganda that is used to put cops on edge and make them trigger happy. There is a long list of jobs that are more dangerous than cop in the US. They hype themselves up that they're in danger all the time and citizens pay the price.
1659447091 did not compare Police Officer’s jobs with other jobs but merely pointed out that traffic stops are dangerous for them. Imagine if part of the job involved a 0.3% possibility of getting killed, how would you approach that part of the job?
> traffic stops are dangerous for them
Traffic stops in the United States are dangerous for them.
In Australia, they're more likely to be killed during a traffic stop because they're hit by cars than getting shot at.
yes, the thread is about US along with any other which discusses police brutality or police killing own citizens :)
I have a lead foot sometimes, and I've had a gun waved (but not pointed, thankfully) at me at least twice that I'm aware of in recent years (Houston area)
Lol, they risk having to abuse their power and face no consequence?
Try showing a palestinian flag or an anti monarchy piece of paper in the very civilised and liberal UK and see what happens to you in the totally free western world.
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> From how it’s stated, I would expect on the order of at least 5% of non-whites to be imprisoned.
Based on current demographic numbers, you would require almost 7 million people to be imprisoned before you'll accept that authorities are targeting minorities? That's more than 3x the current numbers and 60% of the global incarcerated population.
You're not being intellectually honest with that argument.
> I don’t know
The root of the problem. With a functioning due process regime, we would.
"Today, a federal court found that the federal government’s ongoing immigration raids in Southern California and its denial of access to counsel for arrested immigrants likely violated the Constitution, and issued two temporary restraining orders (TRO) prohibiting the federal government, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), from continuing its unlawful actions in Los Angeles and surrounding counties.
The first TRO bars immigration agents from stopping individuals without reasonable suspicion and from relying on four factors – alone or in combination – including apparent race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or English with an accent; presence in a particular location like a bus stop, car wash, or agricultural site; or the work the person does. The second TRO orders DHS to provide access to counsel on weekdays, weekends, and holidays for people who are detained in B-18, the federal building in downtown Los Angeles."[0]
"A federal judge in California has temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s administration from revoking deportation protections for tens of thousands of immigrants from Honduras, Nepal and Nicaragua.
A searing 37-page ruling argued that a decision by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to cancel those temporary humanitarian protections appeared partially rooted in “racial and discriminatory animus.”
“Color is neither a poison nor a crime,” stated the ruling from District Judge Trina Thompson, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden."[1]
[0]https://www.aclusocal.org/en/press-releases/court-prohibits-...
[1]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
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I think the worry here is the next will systematically overestimate numbers and revise them upwards later.
So the first case was fine, no problem. But the firing and hypothetical retaliation by reversing the polarity of bias, is not fine?
Probably time to invest in the stock market then.
I think the worry here is that the rates were maintained higher for longer using bad data not some communist conspiracy theory.
They have a set process. This is reading tea leaves. The numbers were revised up under Biden and down under Trump. "Clearly this is manipulation based on the fact that it makes me look bad". Said the charlatan.
They were not fired for providing inaccurate numbers, they were fired for making Trump look bad.
I'm sorry, April and June were the Biden administration?
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HN leans a bit to the right due to it being mostly male and tech oriented, which tend to lean libertarian. If that isn’t enough of a safe space for you, your views might be a farther from center than you think
Ah yes, Woke Combinator, the indefatigably progressive bastion, where the innocent are gulagged and a stifling political agenda is imposed by stalinist VC apparatchiks.
This is definitely a valid perspective supported by fact
They really are burying the lede:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-01/biggest-j...
Surely just an innocent mistake...
Thanks for that. https://archive.is/84YPk for folks without a Bloomberg subscription.
The jobs data comes from surveys of businesses and consumers. Fewer of each category are responding, continuing a long-term trend of declining response rates. Cuts affect their ability to collect data with about 15% of the sample "suspended" -- i.e. not done "to align survey workload with resource levels" in the words of the announcement linked from the Bloomberg article.
> "The more data you’re missing and comes in later, the higher the odds the revisions will be much larger," said Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights LLC. "Fifty percent is just not enough."
From a related article:
> BLS surveys firms in the payrolls survey over the course of three months, gaining a more complete picture as more businesses respond. But a smaller share of firms are responding to the first poll. Initial collection rates have repeatedly slid below 60% in recent months — down from the roughly 70% or more that was the norm before the pandemic.
> “The more data you’re missing and comes in later, the higher the odds the revisions will be much larger,” said Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights LLC. “Fifty percent is just not enough.”
[…]
> “We are seeing these cuts to funding for government agencies affect their ability to collect and analyze economic data,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon. “And for all of the reports that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is conducting, there is likely to be more volatility going forward.”
* https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...
From William Beach, the Trump-appointed predecessor to the just-fired chief (and Heritage Foundation fellow):
> The totally groundless firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS, sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau. For a full statement opposing this move, read: https://www.friendsofbls.org/updates/2025/8/1/statement-on-c...
* https://twitter.com/BeachWW453/status/1951376029060055506#m
Beach was on an April 2025 episode from Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, "Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying":
> Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even harder. People aren't responding to surveys like they used to. Survey responses have also become a lot more divided along political lines. And at the same time, the Trump administration wants to cut back on government spending, and the worry is that fewer official resources will make tracking the US economy even harder for statistical departments that were already stretched. Bill Beach was commissioner of labor statistics and head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics during Trump's first presidency and also during President Biden's. On this episode, we talk to him about the importance of official data and why the rails for economic data are deteriorating so quickly.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfgpqVixeIw
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...
* https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...
I voted for Trump and am not a fan of this. He's been doing a ton of terrible stuff the past few weeks. Very disappointing. Definitely liked the first few months he was in office.
The guy who went through with the fake electors scheme does bad things, who could have guess it?
The job numbers that he doesn't like? They're from the first few months he was in office.
Sure that's fine. It looked like we were getting a downturn of some sort this year no matter what the government did anyway just based off the debt term structure.
Don't fire people for reporting data though.
Are you kidding? This is the type of thing Tr*mp has always done. He occupied the office before, remember? I swear no one remembers the disaster that was 2016-2020. I don't know how anyone could forget. Historians ranked him the 3rd worst presidential term ever.
> It looked like we were getting a downturn of some sort this year no matter what the government did anyway just based off the debt term structure.
Who was predicting a downturn in 2025? What predictions of a downturn were being published in December 2024?
The fact of the matter is is that the numbers at the 2024 were looking great:
> Trump hammered the administration for creating an “economic catastrophe,” but some of his favorite gauges for assessing economic performance have been humming.
* https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/15/biden-economy-donal...
And the only predictions of a downturn in 2025 was if Trump made good on his threats of tariffs:
* https://chamber.ca/news/trumps-25-tariff-threat-new-analysis...
So you voted for tariffs by voting for Trump, and by voting for tariffs you voted for economic instability. There was nothing in the pre-Trump policies and economic thinking that would have caused an economic downturn.
Further, you voted for the gutting and privatization government functions:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
The mental gymnastic of a MAGA supporter. Shocked by the guy who wouldn't accept that he was wrong about the weather and drew a new path with a sharpie. These guys don't like the weather for Chrissake and blame the "other side"!
> downturn of some sort this year no matter what the government did anyway just based off the debt term structure
But I guess not far from the mental gymnastic of "this is not happening due to flip flopping on tariffs".
I am sure as things get worse many people will use this same excuse of "But I didn't know he was going to do this" excuse to distance themselves for the mess which is coming.
For now yay! for massaged data going forward.