Buy your own phone like everyone’s saying, but also use an MVNO instead of setting money on fire paying the major carriers. The better MVNOs even have multiple carriers and allow you to switch at any time.
Honestly everyone should just use T-Mobile Connect. They make it very hard to find on their site, but it's their true prepaid service, cheapest plan is 5GB of data and unlimited calls/texts, and it won't a lesser priority like MVNOs are.
The fact that people pay over $100/month for a phone bill is truly a uniquely mind-boggling American thing.
Depending on the MVNO you can get first-class priority data (my plan has it), but also this stuff has never made a difference in my experience. When I was on 'lower priority' data the differences in speed weren't noticeable if I had service at all, and in the cases where I was at some event where there was a lot of devices contending for access to the tower, nobody was getting service.
From a different news story about this change, it doesn't apply to any phone activated before the government issued its approval earlier this month. So any phone which you activated in 2025 is not covered by this.
Same. I switched to US Mobile, which is cheaper than Tracfone, has all three carriers, and thanks to eSIM they allow you to switch carriers any time you want.
People planning the post-WWII system wildly overestimated how how disciplined Americans could be.
The whole point of the US transitioning to a service economy was that it would upskill the workforce into the world's Delta Force team of highly educated scientists, engineers, researchers, etc. The rest of the world would handle the boring stuff like actually manufacturing the beautiful inventions designed by the US.
The problem is that a lot of the US populace is gung-ho patriotic and willing to die for their country, but absolutely refuses to learn math or generally do their homework for their country, which is what's actually required for this whole scheme to work.
I'm paraphrasing the shockingly astute observations of this guy[1].
I remember studying pre-WWI history, and particularly how carefully Bismarck arranged German foreign policy like he was the diplomatic equivalent of Bobby Fischer. Everything was situated perfectly and Germany was totally content.
Then along came the absolute moron Wilhelm, and he managed to Leroy Jenkins Germany's beautifully arranged relationships into an aggressive, tactless nightmare where all Germany's allies were turned into enemies, and everything turned out exactly like you'd expect.
As the saying goes, history doesn't repeat but it often rhymes.
You can also draw a comparison with the late imperial stage of other empires, most recently the British.
The British Empire actually reached its greatest territorial extent in the 1920s and 30s, but it was overextended, policymaking was becoming increasingly erratic and in hindsight we can see the writing was already on the wall
The British didn't really make unforced errors like Germany did, though. They mostly were forced into a fire sale situation as they were fighting for their lives. Even with everything they sold off, they were still within an inch of surrendering. The French story is similar. They may have been in a slow decline, but the war threw them off a cliff.
It's hard to look at what the US is doing and not become extremely angry, because historically the dumb hubristic nationalism always leads to crushing misery. It's so utterly predictable, and yet we're forced to watch the idiocy play itself out again.
When societies can't solve their internal problems internally they tend to turn outward for solutions.
Everybody could see the long string of preventable phenomena leading up to this: financial deregulation, decline of civic institutions, high levels of deaths of despair, rampant individualism, unchecked commerce, rising internal violence, rising inequality, rotten media landscape, open political corruption (not in this order).
My only hope at this point is the minimization of violence when the US resets.
I agree but the difference between the French and the British is the French really didn't have a choice (they got physically invaded).
You could make a very good case that for Britain entering into WW1 was a catastrophic and ultimately unnecessary decision. And you could make a (much more controversial but I think also true) case that entering into WW2 was also not necessary and ultimately fairly catastrophic.
Yet the British elites chose to do both. Pride, hubris, stupidity, maybe well deserved, call it what you want, but in the end British power was given away cheaply. I think what the US is currently doing is foolish but as you say there's also a sort of inevitability about it.
Edit: You could also add the Soviet Union to this, an even more recent example of the end of an empire. Towards the end during the Gorbachev era policymaking went from relatively "normal" (by Soviet standards) to extremely bizarre in a short space of time
What the guy below said - the UK would have become more like switzerland, much richer, not had a lot of its historic architecture destroyed and two generations of young men slaughtered.
I think it's actually really difficult to make the case for entering either war
What makes you think that the UK would fare like Switzerland and not like Norway, who also tried staying neutral?
What makes you think a Europe with, for example, Nazi Germany as hegemon would be safer for the UK, or that the UK would have a choice in fighting or not?
My point is that projecting some future based on choices not taken is purely historical fiction and there is no reason to believe anything would go the way you or I think it would have gone had UK done this or that. There are far too many variables to consider, and it is impossible to experiment. I think you can make the case the other way just as well that politics of appeasement in the time leading up to WW2 led to the war being even more devastating.
So you're right that we don't know for sure what would have happened in the counterfactual.
Hitler was very willing to cut a deal with Britain in 1939 and in fact supposedly was extremely upset when Britain declared war (as he should have been, it was a bad scenario for him as well).
Now could he have been trusted? Perhaps not, but bear in mind the UK in 1939 still had the world's most powerful navy and as an island would have been very difficult to invade.
I would argue that the British elite's obsession with playing Risk and thinking they have a divine right to decide the political makeup of continental europe was and is pure hubris, narcissism and stupidity.
Leave it up to france, germany and russia to sort out who runs the north european plain, that's none of our business
One good thing about the collapse of Soviet Union was that Gorbachev refused to start senseless wars. There were hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers stationed in various countries of Eastern Europe, but he explicitly said he will not use force to hold the countries in the Soviet fold. After that the communist regimes there promptly fell. Putin apparently thinks this was a mistake he decided to correct. So I don't know, maybe Gorbachev was telling us the (hubris, stupidity) is not inevitable, and Putin is telling it is inevitable, after all? Time will tell I guess.
(As a US citizen self-identified moderate) I think I understand some of the intentions of de-dollarization. Being the reserve currency is an exorbitant privilege of forcing the world to allow the US to essentially print money that the world ends up using. It is not a privilege that "the average American" gets to enjoy for many, many reasons. It might be telling that no other nation is trying to fill that role of reserve currency with their own currency; perhaps it's not as much of a privilege as we might think. Given the political climate, both domestic and foreign, I think de-dollarization has large potential upside for the well-being of humans.
I see the US trying to position itself so that it is no longer the world power/world police, or at least significantly reduce the magnitude of the role it plays as the world police. This will bring about a new world order and upend existing diplomatic relationships which will bring about chaos and uncertainty.
I disagree with kidnapping Maduro and posturing to annex Greenland on the grounds of national sovereignty; I actually like the rules-based world order (even if I am not so attached to the USD being the reserve currency).
The actions of the Trump administration clearly and perhaps even intentionally puts the US hegemony at great risk and thus also invites much chaos. This, I still humbly see the possible upside. The Trump administration is also accelerating the deterioration of the rules-based world order. This, I do not particularly support, though I see the possible counterargument that this is only accelerating what was game-theoretically inevitable anyways.
The thing is, either some country is going to be the world's referee, or we're going to descend into a lot of regional conflicts with a million dead here, ten million dead there, forever, or we will see rampant nuclear proliferation.
My money is on the last possibility. Honestly that might be the best outcome, even if it's the riskiest. A nuclear-armed Ukraine never would've been invaded. A nuclear-armed Taiwan will never be invaded. A nuclear-armed Canada will never be invaded. At this point, honestly I'd heartily endorse giving Denmark a nuclear triad of their own.
I don't think you can compare pre-WWI Germany to the US for many reasons. In the colonial era, Germany as a fairly new state and unlike the UK, Spain, France, even Portugal or the Netherlands, they didn't have colonies to exploit. Worse, in the industrialization era they didn't have access to oil.
This created a paranoia in Germany, an insecurity that were between Great Powers and were dependent on imports and poorer than their neighbours. They felt like they'd eventually get swallowed unless they did something and the end result was WWI. And WW2 if you think about it.
The cost of victory against Germany (twice) was huge. All those Great Powers lost their colonies and they impoverished themselves with war economies while enriching the United States who, at times, sold arms to all sides.
The US is that Great Power now, complete with colonies. It's energy independent too. So it's nohting like Germany. In fact it's turned Europe into a client state (ie through NATO). These aren't colonies in the British Empire sense of occupying India, for example. It's economic colonialism. The Global South is controlled via the IMF and World Bank. The developed world is controlled with security gurantees.
But where I agree with you is that an absolutel moron has come along and threatens to dismantle this entire system. That's what's happening. Splintering NATO, abolishing USAID, etc all diminish American soft (and hard) power.
China's foreign policy has become to sit and wait while the US destroys itself. They don't have to do anything anymore. It's why i laugh when people predict China will invade Taiwan. No they won't. Why? Because they don't have to. As a reminder, One China is the official policy of the US government.
My problem is that empires don't die quietly. They die violently. And we're going to see a wave of fascism. Things are going to get much, much worse before they get better.
> They felt like they'd eventually get swallowed unless they did something and the end result was WWI. And WW2 if you think about it.
I think this exactly how the US administration _feels_. Alexandr Dugin proposed spheres of influence. Russia starts acting on those. China is getting more powerful. Its now or never.
I'm an historical materialist. That means I don't believe religion, ethnicity or political philosophy ever drives international conflict. It's always, always, always material interests. Those other things are just an excuse, something to rile up the populace into supporting the government and dying on the front line.
So some think Duginism and a Greater Russia is driving Putin's expanionist activity in Ukraine (including Crimea and the invasion in 2022). I don't see it that way. It's using the Russian diaspora as an excuse for expansion, similar to what Hitler did in Austria and the Sedetenland. But the interests are material.
Russia does have a "legitimate" interest in not having a hostile Great Power on its borders. I include NATO as an extension of the US. I say "legitimate" in the sense that they're doing the exact same thing the US does. The US has the (ever-changing) Monroe Doctrine and almost started World War Three over Cuba (despite instigating the confrontation in Turkey).
But NATO was never going to expand to include Ukraine. Bush and Biden both made offhand comments about it but countries like Germany would always veto Ukraine's membership because they don't want NATO on Russia's borders. And Putin knows this. So there's some historical revisionism going on to say that Putin invaded Ukraine because of NATO. I personally think he would've done it anyway.
The real problem is that Russia wants a warm water port on the Black Sea and that's what Sevastopol is. Ukraine cut off the water and it's becoming increasingly expensive to maintain that holding so Russia has captured what's essentially a land bridge to Crimea and plans to hold on to it until the West gets bored.
I believe that Putin arguably overplayed his hand by buying European silence on the matter with natural gas dependence.
The US however spends a ton of money and military force and political will projecting power into, say, the Middle East. Is that in the US sphere of influence? No. The US is also a net energy exporter now so you can't even blame securing oil as an excuse for it.
The US isn't operating in a deeply insecure fashion. Instead, they're simply extracting wealth from all over the world for the benefit of a handful of billionaires.
I guess where the US is insecure is in that no system other than neoliberalism can be allowed to exist and prosper because it might cause the populace to revolt. The existence of the USSR actually forced to the US to give Americans something so they didn't revolt. This desire means that any quasi-socialist nation gets starved with sanctions and couped to maintain this illusion.
And the US's big problem is they can't bully and starve China in this way.
Overall some great points here, but some don't make sense.
> The real problem is that Russia wants a warm water port on the Black Sea
Russia already had several other ports on the Black Sea, so it's not clear to me why they'd need to invade Ukrainian territory to get one extra.
> Germany would always veto Ukraine's membership because they don't want NATO on Russia's borders.
They've already voted three other Russia-bordering countries into NATO. They were practically falling over themselves to add Finland (along with Sweden)[1]
> The process in the Bundestag was "extremely fast," DW's political correspondent Nina Haase said.
> Haase said, citing unnamed sources, that Germany had intended to become the first country to ratify the accession, but other countries were faster. "But nevertheless, the signal remains the same... [Germany] is firmly behind the idea of Finland and Sweden joining NATO," she added.
You make the point that the US is insecure about any other system being successful, I think there's a case to be made that Russia similarly couldn't tolerate a prosperous democratic Ukraine sitting right next door and embarrassing them. You could also argue that, materially, Ukraine has natural resources that Russia just wants to steal.
> Russia already had several other ports on the Black Sea
You're not wrong. I kind of glossed over the details for brevity. Sevastopol has historically been the home of the Russian Black Sea fleet and is a much larger port than other Russian ports on the Black Sea, who also have significant commercial traffic, so they're much more crowded.
Behind all this is the Montreux Convention on Turkey's governance of the Bosphorus. Anyone with a permanent naval base on the Black Sea is allowed to traverse the straits (other than in times of war; it's complicated) so should Sevastopol in future fall into enemy hands, it would allow a foreign military power to station warships in the Black Sea. That foreign power could be Ukraine as a NATO member.
As I stated elsewhere, I don't believe this was a realistic possibility but it makes for a justification. I still say Sevastopol is more significant for it being a deep water port and control of territorial waters than any legitimate security threat.
> They've already voted three other Russia-bordering countries into NATO
There's a difference. I'll try to be brief.
Ukraine is flat. It is basically the conventional invasion corridor from Europe to Moscow and was used that way by both Napoleon and Hitler. I mean they failed spectacularly but that's another story. So there's a security argument that the Ukraine border is, in the very least, more sensitive than other borders.
Technically Poland shares a border with Kaliningrad, which is technically Russian territory but that's not quite the same thing. Also, the 1990s and early 2000s were a different time when post-Soviet Russia was weak before it became an energy giant and reawakened as a regional power.
Norway joined in 1949. Different time. Mountainous border. Not really a strategic threat. Norway was a founding member and this occurred before the USSR had the atomic bomb (by a matter of months).
Finland was really a direct response to the Ukraine invasion. It's a softer border than Norway but doesn't have the same strategic threat.
So you can make an argument that Russia has a legitimate concern of having NATO forces on their border. Imagine a scenario where Canada or Mexico joined a military alliance with China and China wanted to put military bases along the US border. would the US just stand by and take that? Absolutely not. So it's hard to completely dismiss Russia having the exact same strategic concern.
But, like I said, I don't think there was a serious threat of Ukraine joining NATO. Borders go both ways. Pre-invasion I don't think the European powers had any interest in a NATO buildup on the Ukraine-Russia border and if Ukraine was a NATO member, a Russian buildup on their side of their border would then become a serious NATO problem.
Would Germany really want to have Article 5 invoked if Russian forces crossed into the Dombas? I don't think so.
> I think there's a case to be made that Russia similarly couldn't tolerate a prosperous democratic Ukraine sitting right next door and embarrassing them.
I... don't. Ukraine is a poor country. A lot of its economy was built on transit fees for Russian natural gas going to Europe in Russian pipeline, a situation that Russia didn't like and they'd actively been building pipelines around Ukraine to avoid those transit fees (eg Nordstream 1 & 2).
In all this, nobody really knows just how rich Putin is. There are just wild guesses but those guesses realistically go all the way up to hundreds of billions of dollars. Russia is a kleptocracy (in a way that the US is becoming, as an aside). It could be that Putin miscalculated Ukraine's resolve and Europe's response and saw it as an opportunity to enrich himself further. I really don't know.
If anything Ukraine is like Venezuela. It's not so much about profiting from Ukraine's oil and gas deposits (for example) but simply making sure nobody else can. Developing Venezuelan oil fields would actually devalue Western oil companies so they're not going to do it. But if nobody else can? Great.
There's a lot of speculation here. Reasonable people can disagree. What I mostly object to is the self-referential idealist interpretation that underlies US foreign policy messaging. We are the good guys because we're the good guys. Rusia are the bad guys because they're the bad guys. Nobody is inherently anything. There are just people and governments responding to material interests. That's my philosophy.
> Anyone with a permanent naval base on the Black Sea is allowed to traverse the straits (other than in times of war; it's complicated) so should Sevastopol in future fall into enemy hands, it would allow a foreign military power to station warships in the Black Sea. That foreign power could be Ukraine as a NATO member.
You have already been corrected regarding ports in Crimea being the only ones available to Russia and your reply doesn't make any sense either. There are multiple NATO member countries with ports on the Black Sea. Including Turkey who controls Bosphorus!
> Russia does have a "legitimate" interest in not having a hostile Great Power on its borders. I include NATO as an extension of the US. I say "legitimate" in the sense that they're doing the exact same thing the US does. The US has the (ever-changing) Monroe Doctrine and almost started World War Three over Cuba (despite instigating the confrontation in Turkey).
Russia already shares borders with multiple NATO countries. Invading Ukraine caused yet another country (Finland) to join and Russia didn't seem to concerned about it.
Many interesting points. I of course know nothing, but I don't see the strategic importance of Sevastopol. If you're Russia controlling Sevastopol, yes it doesn't freeze but where are you going to go? In peace time it doesn't matter who controls Sevastopol, your merchant marine can use it just fine. In war time, where are you going to go? You are certainly not going to cross the Bosphorus, Suez, or Gibraltar. Going back to spheres of influence I guess it does make sense to project power and keep control of the Black Sea and it's neighborhood, and if Russia honestly thought they could take Ukraine in three days then I get how it seemed like a reasonable bet.
> But NATO was never going to expand to include Ukraine.
Agreed on all points but this. This is just factually wrong. Ukraine formally declared its intention to pursue NATO membership which was accepted by the NATO council.
The most significant early push occurred at the Bucharest Summit (April 2008). Ukraine (along with Georgia) requested a Membership Action Plan (MAP) - the standard preparatory program for aspiring members. NATO's declaration welcomed Ukraine's aspirations and stated that "these countries will become members of NATO". Ukraine's parliament repealed its non-bloc status and amended its constitution to enshrine irreversible pursuit of NATO (and EU) membership as a national goal. Then, NATO officially listed Ukraine as an aspiring member.
In the Vilnius Summit, NATO even declared that "Ukraine’s future is in NATO" and its path is "irreversible".
These were empty words of consolation after the allies decided not to invite Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.
Eventually, you will receive a million bucks from me. I am not giving you any timeline or conditions, but trust me, you are on an irreversible path toward that, I promise.
Der Spiegel has a report detailing the efforts of Germany (particularly Merekel) and France (under Sarkozy) actively blocking any efforts to block Ukraine from joining NATO [1]:
> [2008] was the year that Ukraine was likely closer to becoming a member of the Western alliance than ever, before or since. United States President George W. Bush stood solidly behind Kyiv's accession. But the effort failed, as Zelenskyy made clear, due to the opposition of Merkel and Sarkozy – and an "absurd fear" of Russia. Because of this "miscalculation," the Ukrainian president continued, his country is facing "the most terrible war in Europe since World War II."
There were other European members who had objections or serious reservations.
> Ukraine's parliament repealed its non-bloc status and amended its constitution to enshrine irreversible pursuit of NATO
There was also a period under Yanukovych (a Russian puppet, to be clear) that repealed those efforts, which again changed after the revolution in 2014-2015.
The Vilnius Summit took place in 2023, a year into the war with Russia. As such, I consider it empty platitudes. For one thing, no country can join NATO with active border disputes. I don't see that ever happenign simply because Russia will start a border dispute to avoid that happening.
Even Zelensky recognized the plan as "absurd" [2].
Eh, I don't think that is really a consistent, useful model. It's not that material interests are irrelevant, but ideological alignment even at the most Machiavellian level constrains what's possible, if not outright defining where lines are drawn. You can't ignore how politics happens within countries when looking at how they interact with each other.
Also, messaging matters. To make a crass analogy, if I punch you in the face and tell you it’s because I just felt like it, vs. because I thought you slept with my girlfriend, you’re going to respond completely differently (after the initial surprise).
In fact, everyone who bore witness to the punch would come away with different opinions depending on the reason I gave for punching you. And those opinions have knock-on effects (“We shouldn’t come to this part of town anymore, people just get punched out of nowhere…”)
Even if China begins to take over much of the world's economic power, I don't think the rest of the world will accept Chinese culture in the face of Western social values.
The wave of fascism is already rising in Europe, but it is still very much under control. Like the AfD political party in Germany.
France has Macron siding with Le Pen to keep Melanchon out of power. The AfD's power is growing and we'll see if there exists a coalition that can form a government without them after the next election. Many expect Nigel Farrage to be the next Prime Minister of the UK.
This is why people say fascism is capitalism in crisis. All of these countries are choosing fascism rather than any socialist movement or even saying "maybe the wealthy could loot slightly less from the public purse". The rise of fascism is paved by centrist neoliberals siding with fascists to crush any leftist momentum.
People are increasingly seeing what life is like in China. Affordable housing, affordable food and public infrastructure like extensive metros and high speed trains. That's the real problem with Tiktok (from the administration's perspective). People asking "why can't we have that?" is incredibly dangerous to the system we have. IMHO there's no unringing that bell however.
"Western social values" are a luxury easily abandoned when you can't afford your rent. Populist fascism is rising because people are increasingly desperate and there's no alternative because the centrists are united with the fascists to crush any leftist momentum.
The president ran on having Gestapo in the streets and having concentration camps. How loyal really are voters to "Western social values"? And what are prominent Democratic politicians doing? Suggesting more funding for ICE [1].
A populist party that ran on giving people healthcare and guaranteeing a roof over their heads and having enough to eat would win in a landslide. Every level of our political system is designed to make sure such a person can't rise to prominence.
Don't believe me? Look at the 2024 election results and see how progressive voter initiatives did compared to the Democratic Party. Missouri, a deep red state, had a majority vote for raising the minimum wage, outperforming the Democratic Party by more than 20 points.
> "Western social values" are a luxury easily abandoned when you can't afford your rent. Populist fascism is rising because people are increasingly desperate and there's no alternative because the centrists are united with the fascists to crush any leftist momentum.
I think this is the most important and crucial part of what you've said in here.
If you look, East germany former communists states were the biggest voters in favor of the AfD: Saxony and Thuringia. What I understand is that the left wing parties of today's society have forgotten about the 'conservative' socialism that focused on providing good education, food, housing and employment for the general population. Something that was always incorporated on conservative parties, like the CDU in Germany.
Following the disastrous political consequences of Merkel's 2015 immigration crisis, AfD entered the game with the fury from the German population. The alliance of the conservative CDU with the AfD makes a lot of sense.
I may be insane, but I feel there is always some kind of collective Jungian aura or desire among the general population, especially among the elders, for sane, conservative policies to control society and make life bearable. The writings of Jung are quite telling of this phenomenon.[1]
> What I understand is that the left wing parties of today's society have forgotten about the 'conservative' socialism that focused on providing good education, food, housing and employment for the general population.
I feel the shifting definitions of liberal (US) and conservative taking place under our feet. Suddenly conservatives care about public welfare (but only for the in-group), and liberals prefer laissez faire economy (as opposed to the Trump tariff tantrums).
Margaret MacMillan is a modern historian with a liberal world view and no ideological incentive to defend Bismarck, and in her phenomenal work The War that Ended Peace (2013) she largely supports this view.
What gave the US the power it's now throwing away was an array of successes that made the US an example of good governance for the entire world: New Deal, Bretton Woods agreeement, victory in WW2, Marshall Plan and NATO. There wasn't a single person in charge of that all, but I think 3 stand out:
* Henry Morgenthau Jr.: secretary of Treasury during Roosevelt, one of the main designers of the New Deal, of financing the US war machine during WW2, and also one of the US negotiators at the Bretton Woods conference
* George C. Marshall: chief of staff of the US Army, organized the victory in WW2, came up with the eponymous plan and carried it forward politically. secretary of State after the War
* Dean Acheson: main designer of the Marshall Plan and of NATO, and one of the US negotiators at the Bretton Woods conference. secretary of State after Marshall
I wouldn't put it on one person, it was basically everyone between Roosevelt and Obama. Not that any of them were exactly geniuses, but we've gone from mostly sober drivers to someone blowing a 0.5 BAC.
do you mind qualifying this? it sounds like you mean dollar hegemony, which I might accept, but if you mean foreign policy in general, I can think of many invasions , financial crises, cold wars, lost prosperity for most of those Presidents.
I think we're talking less about the aspect of Bismarck where he won 3 big wars and lost none, and more about the part where he set up a delicate system that was maybe too complex for his successors to maintain, especially under idiosyncratic leaders. We're not talking about financial crises. Bismarck did not stop the Panic of 1873 (in fact, you could wave your hands and argue he indirectly caused it).
As far as "who set up the US empire, in all its complexity?", I'd argue for the 4 guys I named in my other comment, but your list might differ. And if you're just interested in the dollar system per se, I'd probably go with Harry Dexter White, who strangely enough turned out to be a Soviet spy.
Oh, and if you want a pretty clear analogy from Bismarck's system to earlier US monetary history: Benjamin Strong got the Federal Reserve System up and running and figured out a bunch of the right tricks, but he died in 1928 without getting his successors up to speed on how to run things. They failed miserably in next couple years. Bad timing!
Your list and the one above (e.g. with General Marshall, etc) are more illustrative & aligned with developing US Hegemony than the 20th Century Presidents. It seems to me the US presidents have been drawing down hegemony assets since JFK.
It's just that the USA was so dominant after WW2 that it took about a century for the structure to collapse.
A better model than seeing Trump as a wrecking ball, is seeing him as a high stakes gambler, with middling skills -- in the same way that George W Bush made a big bet on the middle east and lost the chips.
It's a permanent professional army, where are you getting this stuff? Switzerland has an air force and everything. They also have a large trained citizen militia but it's supported by a backbone of a professional standing army.
> They also have a large trained citizen militia but it's supported by a backbone of a professional standing army.
Less than 10% are full timers, the vast majority are conscripts and volunteers. Even officers generally aren't full timers[1].
All I'm saying is, there's a spectrum of 'Complete citizen militia, as envisioned by the framers of the US Constitution' all the way over to 'Standing army as it exists in the US today', and Switzerland is obviously much closer to the former than the latter.
Believe it or not, people aren't buying Audis in China because they're thrifty.
China was a huge market for Audi in the past as luxury status symbol. However, now Chinese buyers are so enamored with new tech-heavy Chinese luxury cars that Audi had to go make a whole sub-brand specific to the Chinese market just to stay in the game[1].
> VoIP spam callers which operators are too happy to tolerate
The fact that this still hasn't been solved in the year 2026 makes me wish nothing but bankruptcy on the entire legacy POTS system. Burn it all to the ground.
It's noteworthy that this is happening right as the EU is about to wrap up a trade deal with the Southern Common Market[1] creating the largest free trade zone in the world (and it doesn't include the United States).
I think it's just TikTok eating them alive[1] globally (let's face it, microblogging is simply inferior to short form video when it comes to creating stimulating content), along with the self-own of making themselves overtly The Right-Wing Site and alienating half of the US audience. Musk himself even said:
> "For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally?
So clearly he knew he was making the site undeserving of public trust and reaping the rewards of that.
Also, the site is leaning into creating content that's overtly immoral and downright felonious in many jurisdictions, and this is likely going to catch up with it this year. I would bet this current bad news for them is just the beginning.
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