I expected the Trump tariffs to be a disaster. I'm puzzled by what I'm not seeing. They don't seem to have harmed the US economy in any way I can notice with my eyeballs or in the statistics. Business activity is booming, unemployment seems to be low, household consumption is up, stock market seems to be doing fine. Is my whole model of trade and economics broken? How is he getting away with this?

What's a better metric for "how libertarian" a President is than "percent of the federal workforce eliminated?" The federal workforce shrunk by roughly 348,000 workers in 2025, according to federal data. That's almost 12%. A cut unprecedented since the WW2 demobilization.

in your experience, how can you tell when someone is really smart?

I love all these “right-wingers” who are like “the Republican Party hasn’t done anything to earn my vote.” Yes they have. THEY AREN’T COMMUNISTS! We all know they’re dysfunctional. Hell, my toddler knows. In fact I’d go so far as to say they’re the worst political party in existence, except for all the others. But as it stands they are the only thing preventing America from becoming Great Britain. So if you don’t like them fix them. Don’t just sit idly by while Bolsheviks pillage the two-and-a-half centuries of hard work by your ancestors. That’s borderline traitorous. You should know by now that life ain’t fair, and you don’t always get your way. And that everything Communism touches is gone forever.

15/ on the one hand, yes, this is the Central Existential Question that defines our time on the other hand a simple mechanistic answer is "we don't have to be BETTER; we just have to be BETTER IN RATIO" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar… xitter.cf/USpiaggia/status/20846…

Reminder that the Founding Fathers also drank excessively. Today you can do that too.

No its still good. Look good things rarely live up to idealistic vision but this is still the Best Thing. The bad ideas of today are not that bad by any historical standards and this process still, even now, is what sharpens the arguments that weaken them. You fear rumor and misinformation? My god the dumb things people believed recently, this all is nothing. You fear wrong but high fitness ideas? Well me too but they've never been scared of back rooms and small crowds. The worst but most contagious ideas were always more contagious in the small society, the group, than the public. No this doesn't have the sheen of the university, the glamor of spitballing it at 2am over that last drink, it's down in the mud and the muck but this here, today, the fights we have, the dumb things we say are still the best truth discovery we have ever had. It doesn't get better than this. I still believe.