Hormuz crisis side effect: a sharp rise in container shipping rates | Hacker News Reader

Hormuz crisis side effect: a sharp rise in container shipping rates

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201 pointsmooreds183 comments

There were numerous simulations/war games run by the US and other militaries going back 20, 25, 30 years that basically came to the conclusion that:

a) If Iran was attacked with sufficient severity they would take the step to close the straight of Hormuz

b) Iran was developing or already had small-boat, mine laying, missile and UAV capacity sufficient to do so

c) Iran was actively working on ways to hide this missile, uav, small boat capacity in the general region of the straight of hormuz in hundreds of small locations (down to the size/scale of a civilian small warehouse or garage), making it impossible to air strike/remove all of this capability with any known certainty without causing absurd levels of civilian casualties

d) The only way to remove the missile, small boat, uav capability would be an extremely large boots on the ground and manpower intensive ground based search to hunt it down. You couldn't be sure you could remove the capability strictly from the air.

e) Invading Iran would not be a thee-week special operation like invading Iraq was.

Counterpoint: it would be a three-week special operation a lot like invading Iraq, in that after minor victories the administration would declare "Mission Accomplished" before burning trillions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting an insurgency.

It wouldn't even get to that point, because in order to be fighting an insurgency, you have to actually win on the ground and occupy the country.

Without a coalition of fools, the US has zero odds of success in that first step. It wouldn't be a long war of insurgency, it would just be a long war.

Iran is far bigger, far more capable, and far more difficult to wage war in than Iraq ever was.

not saying this should be a tactic we should employ, but the us has never invaded a country with the intent to conquor(except mexico). like, as in, iran is now part of the us.

the world would be aghast... but they already are?

It couldn't do it without switching to a war economy and full mobilization. And that would spell the end of the current US regime long before it would end the Iranian one.

Trump's approval rating has a floor of 40%, but that would likely send it to the 30s, and turn MAGA into a 30-seat party.

I completely agree. I guess i should say it vice a versa. It will be impossible to win Iran and has been proven by everything from vietnam to the middle east escapades...

If you go to war with a country, you cannot allow the country to exist in any form if you truely wish the 'win a war'.

It's a modern, wierd, primarily US based 'design of war', we learned from the cold war. Go in, destabalize it enough, ensure a coup every couple of years, so that region cannot ever be a material threat to you (like the ottoman empire)

(except mexico)

and Canada

and Hawaii

The fact that we've invaded every bordering country with the intent to conquer kind of invalidates your argument...

well.. those are the ones we won?

The United States did not win the invasion of Canada during the revolutionary war.

The US also did not win the invasion of Canada during the war of 1812. I'm sensing a theme.

The death toll was several orders of magnitude more (300k?).

If you're counting Iraqi deaths (which you should) it's probably past 500k. 600k if you count excess deaths. Ghoulish.

My point was what the American administration would burn and care about, and they clearly didn't/don't care about civilian deaths. TBH they only care about American military losses as far as it hurts their political capital at home.

There’s probably going to be a famine or famines due to lack of, and expense, of fertilizer resulting in less food for the developing world.

Add to that the USAID shutdown and other impacts to humanitarian relief caused by the DOGE team. It’s all coming together for a really nightmarish time for developing countries

I'm not certain how recently you were in the grocery store but it's getting pretty serious in developed countries as well - not famine levels, for sure, but meat prices in Canada are going crazy right now and we're just feeling the first wave of the supply shocks - this will get a lot worse before it gets better.

Perfect time to explore alternatives to eating meat.

If your pitch to the general American electorate to solve the affordability crisis is to become vegetarian good luck getting elected.

I actually cook extensively with non-animal proteins but I enjoy the choice to do otherwise and, if it's going to be curtailed, I'd prefer it happen for a reason more meaningful that some idiotic international blunder.

I've seen tofu go down in price in recent years. It's incredible. I think my local store is doing a block of extra firm for under $1.50? It used to be $2

America is also having a whey protein shortage, but that's mostly because it's very popular right now and we're eating the available supply of whey powder.

I do not eat meat so I couldn’t say. I haven’t yet seen large increases in Germany for what I buy but I wouldn’t be surprised if the overall prices have been trending up. Not yet to the Covid era, where I could see the rice increase in price every time I would do groceries — and it still hasn’t come down :(

I have found it most dramatic in meat prices but the gluten-free baking flours my partner needs to use have also noticeably increased and I think those (and legumes, especially lentils) are likely to be some of the hardest hit in the long run. Chickpeas, lentils and green peas are sort of the unsung heroes of gluten free baking.

That sucks :( Hopefully you can stock them in large quantity before the price increase too much

I have personally seen considerable increases in grocery ingredient expenses for everything I buy which isn't meat. Yes, buying beef or chicken breast is more expensive now as well, but not eating meat would not have a significant impact in my family's much greater annual grocery expenses vs. the same number of people and for the same calendar period of time in 2022 or 2023.

I mentioned meat because the person I responded to mentioned it. I really don’t know the price of meat given I do not consume any of it, I wasn’t trying to say going vegetarian would save you from inflation

Not one, but two responses from vegans telling you to just stop eating meat. A bit of a classic.

Well one was just commenting that they don't observe meat prices - I don't mind that at all though I have seen non-meat groceries go up as well (just less so than the meat).

I am not vegan, and didn’t tell them to stop eating meat

Despite being positioned in a way that should shield from the more immediate impacts, I keep wondering if that would actually happen at this point. Most parties seem to try hard to avoid the actual conflict and while not escalating further won't save this year's crops, it shouldn't mean that people will automatically die. It may mean, however, that people will not be able to eat what they want, which, in turn, would mean shortages.

edit; grammar and syntax for clarity

It really does seem like this war of choice was[1] an absolutely boneheaded idea. It's the kind of thing (and specifically, the lack of consequences or measures to prevent it from being repeated in Cuba or Greenland) that highlights how broken American politics are right now.

1. Not even in retrospect - intelligence agencies knew this was a significant risk and I'd bet your average person on the streets would have come to the realization that it was a bad idea if they thought about it for like a week.

We're talking about 4D chess here /s

Closure of the Strait of Hormuz is one of the most modeled events in military circles. There are probably thousands of military exercises on it, intelligence estimates, strategic papers and so on. Up until this war, it was unknown if Iran could keep the Strait closed against direct US military pressure. Well, now we know.

There doesn't appear to be a single serious person in the US military, intelligence community or policy support organizations who thought this was a good idea. It was purely political. The administration seems to have listened solely to and relied entirely upon Benjamin Netanyahu and Mossad. Israel has been trying to get this war with every president since Reagan [1] and they've all said "hell no". Until this one.

What's more interesting is that it's been clear what a disaster this almost immediately so we've had ~2 months where it was clear that the US has militarily lost and a negotiated settlement was the only outcome. This would mean the end of economic sanctions and, for anti-Iran hawks in the US and Israel, a spectacularly worse deal than the JCPOA that got torn up. Yet the administration seems more willing to let the world ban than split with Israel.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JC56Ltg5zDE

War is never a good idea, but Iran didn't care and they have been waging war for 40 years. Do you just let them perpetually build strength internally while funding terrorism externally? They have been spreading extremism and instability in the region for decades. They surrounded Israel with militants and attacked them.

We knew they could disrupt shipping through the strait, that is a large part of the purpose behind "drill baby drill", stopping Venezuela from invading Guyana where we have oil infrastructure, and increasing oil investment into Venezuela, along with reopening some oil drilling off California.

We also knew we likely couldn't justify the risks and costs of sending in a large invasion force for multiple reasons. If a decent deal couldn't be made, then at least you remove an oil supplier from China and you mow the grass to limit the threat Iran poses in the near future. Even if the strait remains in conflict for years, in the long-term that is a good thing, because it forces an acceleration of bypassing it as an issue which means Iran loses a big button to push in the future.

Meanwhile, with oil prices higher, that is historically good for oil investment which is excellent for Venezuela so more of the fuels that countries rely on come from our hemisphere. We're not new at this game.

Let's summarize the history here:

1. The British were stealing Iranian oil (ie the Anglo-Persian Company, which is now BPl;

2. Iran democratically elected Mossadegh who said Iranian resources would be for Iranians;

3. The British freak out. MI6 twice goes to the newly elected Eisenhower administration to get them to intervene. They are rebuffed the first time so the British come back with a fabricated story about how this is communism somehow and the Eisenhower administration takes the bait;

4. Eisenhowever overthrows the democratically elected government of Iran to install the Shah as an autocrat (he was previously a figurehead pretty much);

5. The Shah takes the oil and basically gives it to the Americans so the British didn't even get what they wanted;

6. The Shah was a brutal dictator that included Savak, a secret police that had a history of violence, represseion and disappearing people;

7. By the late 1970s it was becoming clear that the Shah's regime would fall. The Americans were worried that the Communists would win and Iran would fall into the Soviet sphere of influence so got their puuppet in the region, Saddam Hussein, to expel Khomenei from Iraq in the hopes that the Isalamic fundamentalists would win;

8. The fundamentalists did win. Iran was punished for expelling the American puppet with crippling economic sanctions. Additionally, Saddam Hussein was armed and prompted to go fight a war with Iran. The Iran-Iraq war lasted years, killed over a million people (iranians and Iraqis) and basically had no other change in borders or regimes in the region;

9. After 9/11. Iran gave material aid to the US including rounding up hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters;

10. Despite 15 of the 19 hijackers being Saudi, Osama bin Laden being Saudi and al-Qaeda getting material support from Saudi princes and Saudi madrasses (religious schools), Iran got lumped in with Iraq and North Korea as the "Axis of Evil". The reason for this were the hawks in the US administration who believed that George HW Bush messed up not overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 1991. They had prior to 9/11 urged the Clinton administration and Congress to invade Iran;

11. Iraq was invaded because the neocon hawks, particularly Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, won the policy debate. It is highly believed they thought they would be overthrowing Iran too;

12. North Korea managed to stave off attacks by developing a nuclear weapon. That was the true lesson of the Global War on Terror: only a nuclear weapon will guarantee your survival;

13. Despite that the second Ayatollah, Khamenei, issued a fatwa against developing a nuclear weapon, something which still stands to this day, in 2003;

14. Obama negotitated (with European allies) the JCPOA, a program to inspect Iranian nuclear sites, in exchange for sanctions relief. There is no proof the Iranians ever violated the agreement. They even kept abiding by it for up to a year after Trump tore it up to appease Israel;

15. Israel committed too many hostile acts to enumerate, including the bombing of an embassy in Damascus, targeted assassinations within Iran, the murder of Iranians overseas, etc, pretty much all of which Iran just took on the chin;

16. The US and Israel started an unprovoked war last year, which included killing the Iranian negotiators. This war went so badly that hostilities ended after 12 days. It was widely suspected at the time that supplies of anti-missile munitions were getting critically low. Iran basically acted in good faith here that the Americans would negotiate in good faith; and

17. The Iranians were wrong. America did not act in good faith and started another unprovoked war at Israel's urging that included, for some reason, blowing up a middle school with almost 200 10-12 year old girls in it and killing an 87 year old man who had refused to develop a nuclear weapon (ie Khamenei) who also refused to go into a bunker because his people didn't have the same protections. That strike also killed a whole bunch of his family and the new Ayatollah's family.

18. This brings us to today. From Iran's position, the US cannot be trusted and does not negotiate in good faith. The uS will not restrain Israel in any way, which is an issue given Israel's insatiable appetite for blowing up babies. So Iran has concluded that the only way to guarantee their sovereignty is to make the economic pain so dire that th eUS never thinks about doing this again.

This has been clear for months now and Trump is choosing Israel over the economic pain that has been inflicted and is still coming. Millions will likely starve in the coming year.

But sure, keep repeating your State Department talking points.

Very nice pro-Iranian walk down the memory lane while comfortbly forgetting how piece and people loving Ayatollah killed thousands of Iranians for what good reason?

It's not "pro-Iranian" to acknowledge democracy. The Shah is also responsible for the death, torture and disappearance of thousands of Iranian citizens, with the help of the CIA.

As a US citizen, that concerns me far more than Iran's self-determination. I don't want my tax dollars going towards Yet Another Torture Regime.

> 2. Iran democratically elected Mossadegh who said Iranian resources would be for Iranians;

He was not really democratically elected, and he was not serving democracy. He was converting it into a dictatorship.

> 4. Eisenhowever overthrows the democratically elected government of Iran to install the Shah as an autocrat (he was previously a figurehead pretty much);

Overthrows the dictator, to restore the authority of the shah, you mean.

> 7. By the late 1970s it was becoming clear that the Shah's regime would fall. The Americans were worried that the Communists would win and Iran would fall into the Soviet sphere of influence so got their puuppet in the region, Saddam Hussein, to expel Khomenei from Iraq in the hopes that the Isalamic fundamentalists would win;

That misunderstands the concern that the fundamentalists themselves were a threat to Iraq and Saddam hated communists too. He tortured and killed Iraqi communist party members, systematically.

> 10. Despite 15 of the 19 hijackers being Saudi, Osama bin Laden being Saudi and al-Qaeda getting material support from Saudi princes and Saudi madrasses (religious schools), Iran got lumped in with Iraq and North Korea as the "Axis of Evil". The reason for this were the hawks in the US administration who believed that George HW Bush messed up not overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 1991. They had prior to 9/11 urged the Clinton administration and Congress to invade Iran;

> 11. Iraq was invaded because the neocon hawks, particularly Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, won the policy debate. It is highly believed they thought they would be overthrowing Iran too;

Iraq had invaded its neighbor Kuwait, bombed the World Trade Center once before, tried to assassinate the president and more. Saudi Arabia was an ally and Saudi Arabian citizens were recruited partially because they have easier access to the US, but they were trained in Afghanistan. It might be fair that we wanted a better footprint in the region as a hedge against Iran. It was obviously complicated.

> 12. North Korea managed to stave off attacks by developing a nuclear weapon. That was the true lesson of the Global War on Terror: only a nuclear weapon will guarantee your survival;

Russia wanted a foothold in Korea to strengthen its aim of acquiring Japanese islands to use as warm water ports, since its northern shores regularly froze. That has been ongoing since the early 1800s. Japan even assassinated a leader of Korea who was warming up to Russia too much back then. Eventually during World War 1, Japan took Korea, but when World War 2 ended they lost it to the US and the Soviet Union.

Similar to west Germany and east Germany, you had communist North Korea, then South Korea, but not really administered by the Korean people until they formed their own governments.

North Korea then got support from Russia and China to invade South Korea. North Korea started the war. North Korea was also the major aggressor even before the war.

A lot of countries don't have nukes and aren't getting invaded by other countries. We didn't invade east Germany, we waited for the Soviet Union to collapse.

> 14. Obama negotitated (with European allies) the JCPOA, a program to inspect Iranian nuclear sites, in exchange for sanctions relief. There is no proof the Iranians ever violated the agreement. They even kept abiding by it for up to a year after Trump tore it up to appease Israel;

The JCPOA set out the terms for compliance. The IAEA says, as far as we know they're complying. This only means compliance with the JCPOA. The JCPOA was a bad deal, so the fact they were mostly observed to be complying with it does not matter much. You don't say JCPOA -> being complied with -> shut off brain, turn off lights, lets go home boys. It was transparency with limits, but there were many other intelligence signals and behaviors from Iran that demonstrated that Iran did not stop being a threat. It was simply growing as a threat with international political cover.

> 15. Israel committed too many hostile acts to enumerate, including the bombing of an embassy in Damascus, targeted assassinations within Iran, the murder of Iranians overseas, etc, pretty much all of which Iran just took on the chin;

Iran has essentially been at war with the US and Israel for many decades. You can't look at an action from Israel or the US in a vacuum, that's very weak logic. Most actions are reactions to things Iran has already done. Iran has been surrounding Israel with funded militants, plus expanding these groups around the region.

> 16. The US and Israel started an unprovoked war last year, which included killing the Iranian negotiators. This war went so badly that hostilities ended after 12 days. It was widely suspected at the time that supplies of anti-missile munitions were getting critically low. Iran basically acted in good faith here that the Americans would negotiate in good faith; and

Iran provoked it by funding Houthi attacks on shipping in 2023 after also funding Hamas to attack Israel shortly before. They were breaking international law by shipping with dark fleets, funding attacks in the region and continuing to develop their nuclear program which the JCPOA allowed them to get a running start on.

They attacked others, so they legitimized attacks against themselves. It wasn't unprovoked. That is a very unreasonable perspective.

> 17. The Iranians were wrong. America did not act in good faith and started another unprovoked war at Israel's urging that included, for some reason, blowing up a middle school with almost 200 10-12 year old girls in it and killing an 87 year old man who had refused to develop a nuclear weapon (ie Khamenei) who also refused to go into a bunker because his people didn't have the same protections. That strike also killed a whole bunch of his family and the new Ayatollah's family.

The school was part of a military compound that may have been repurposed. It wasn't intentional, but it is very common for terrorists to intentionally put innocent people around military targets. Hamas did this regularly in Gaza. International law says civilian targets like this are not valid military targets, unless they are being used by the military. Unfortunately, it was probably both a civilian and valid military target. We don't make it a habit of intentionally killing civilians.

Iran does not have freedom of speech the way the US does. As a result, when information circulates in Iran or comes out from Iran, it is often controlled by the state. They will spread their propaganda, but the information is useless. They will do everything in their power to direct your emotions against the US, rather than themselves for their own behavior that caused these attacks to come.

Unfortunately this nonsense also now fills the internet and people fall for it.

> 18. This brings us to today. From Iran's position, the US cannot be trusted and does not negotiate in good faith. The uS will not restrain Israel in any way, which is an issue given Israel's insatiable appetite for blowing up babies.

Iran was not negotiating in good faith and has not been following international law to start with which are agreements presumably they should be following if they are a good and nice country that just wants to live in peace, International laws greatly benefit peaceful countries. If Iran was peaceful like most other countries, they could be benefiting from those same laws. This isn't only observed by the US and Israel, but by other Middle Eastern countries and Europe too. So you can't really say this is some crazy US Israel thing and Iran is really just being good. Nobody believes that, yet this message spreads online.

> So Iran has concluded that the only way to guarantee their sovereignty is to make the economic pain so dire that th eUS never thinks about doing this again.

We didn't take sovereignty away from Japan, Korea, Iraq, Germany, or Venezuela and so on. Your argument is very weak. We don't want every country, we just want them to be good peaceful countries that let their people live in freedom and peace. That's why we have so many allies. Nobody wants to be like our enemies, because they build their societies on poor logic and nobody is allowed to fix it.

Hi long time United States citizen here:

- I don't care about removing oil suppliers from China, I don't know anyone who does. I get most of my stuff from them, seems like a bad idea

- I don't care about Venezuela or lies about them being (drug lords|conquering invaders|bad hombres), they are sovereign, the U.S has no right, justification or excuse to be kidnapping their leaders or fucking with their politics.

- The United States has been spreading extremism and instability globally for 40+ years.

- Oil production in the U.S. is not meaningfully higher than it was under Biden, so "drill baby drill" was just another lie that's been lapped up and is now being spit back out

- A decent deal HAD BEEN MADE under Obama, it was pretty good most would say, then Trump tore it up because of his ego and tiny dick/tiny hands syndrome.

- "mowing the grass" sounds like terrorism first and foremost and crimes against humanity second.

- Just because the U.S. and Israel Administrations want to self select into being world police does not make it just or right.

> - I don't care about removing oil suppliers from China, I don't know anyone who does. I get most of my stuff from them, seems like a bad idea

Is that because you don't know what caused World War 2 and you don't have any family who served in World War 2?

> - I don't care about Venezuela or lies about them being (drug lords|conquering invaders|bad hombres), they are sovereign, the U.S has no right, justification or excuse to be kidnapping their leaders or fucking with their politics.

Maduro was an internationally wanted criminal. He was also going to invade his neighbor, Guyana after the UN rejected his claim against it. You don't cross half your hemisphere to arrest someone on legal grounds if you don't have a case. International law is not useful as a concept to keep the world from descending into chaos unless some kind of enforcement occurs. The reasons he was officially arrested for are not the only reasons he was arrested.

> - The United States has been spreading extremism and instability globally for 40+ years.

That is not a strong argument. The US was isolationist until its ships were getting attacked at sea. Then it was isolationist until the world kept descending into wars we had to join to stop. Then we established more world structure that has proven to reduce the occurrence of war. We've been trying to establish the same kind of stability Europe has, in the Middle East.

> - Oil production in the U.S. is not meaningfully higher than it was under Biden, so "drill baby drill" was just another lie that's been lapped up and is now being spit back out

Natural gas production - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66384

Crude oil - https://www.arescotx.com/2015-2025-us-field-production-crude... shows an increase in 4mil barrels per day. Even in the first term, the Trump administration was pursuing an energy dominance agenda, but it's not all attributable to their policies.

> - A decent deal HAD BEEN MADE under Obama, it was pretty good most would say, then Trump tore it up because of his ego and tiny dick/tiny hands syndrome.

The US has hundreds of millions of people. Trump is not the only person we have. Iran has been seen as a critical threat to the US, to the region and to the world for many decades. The JCPOA did not stop the threat nor sufficiently monitor it. Iran continued building nuclear sites underground and moved their centrifuges underground, meeting with North Korean nuclear missile scientists, etc. The IAEA also requested access to various sites and were denied or delayed by Iran. The IAEA was only reporting Iran's compliance to its commitments under the JCPOA, which was a bad deal and as such, complying with the JCPOA was insufficient.

Iran had a history of breaking international law which continued after the JCPOA. They have never truly established an essential level of trust that would be required to give them the benefit of the doubt that the JCPOA was being complied with, which the inspection process in place could not guarantee. They were also out of compliance with the JCPOA in developing ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear warhead.

> - "mowing the grass" sounds like terrorism first and foremost and crimes against humanity second.

It's just an analogy. The Iranian revolutionaries have dug themselves in to such an extent that going in to change their regime would almost certainly require so much killing that it would practically be genocide. Reducing their military assets and installations is the alternative. This is all a response to terrorism to start with.

> - Just because the U.S. and Israel Administrations want to self select into being world police does not make it just or right.

No, we don't want to. It's simply existential that we do. We would much rather not. I don't care about most of these places halfway around the world. It would be nice if they'd simply live in peace and have their own lives. They do not. History has proven that if we let chaos abroad gain too much momentum, it will eventually lead to some large scale war that we'll get dragged into. Why do we get dragged into them? Why can't we just stay out of the wars? Well, if one country, like Germany, Japan, China or Russia simply continues to expand outward and gain huge power imbalances, they become a threat to freedom. The US had kinds of freedom that even most citizens do not fully appreciate or deeply understand.

Iran, Russia and China deliberately label the US as their enemy. Even Saudi Arabia has effectively referred to Iran as the Nazi Germany of the Middle East. After the communists helped the Iranian Islamic revolutionaries gain power, they killed thousands of communists. Even recently they slaughtered many thousands of their own people. They do not care about human life.

It's very strange to me that you seem to like defending dictators who torture and kill their own people. I guess that's what the globalized internet is these days.

> Is that because you don't know what caused World War 2 and you don't have any family who served in World War 2?

Pretty familiar, also familiar with Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. I can link pictures and articles detailing American Service Members and the women and children they shot, blew up, raped, burned alive, and otherwise mutilated in each of those engagements.

My familiarity with WW2, and it's causes make my deeply uneasy about the idea of going to war with a peer power like China; China who was an ally in WW3, maybe you don't know this and didn't have any family who served in World War 2?

Anyways no idea why you'd bring this up or what point you were trying to make? War is good or something? War can be justified if the orange man on the TV says the (enemy) country is "bigly bad"?

---

The amount of delusion here is actually baffling, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law I'm not going to respond to all of this. I do think it's incredibly entertaining to watch people/bots defend the convicted felons leading the U.S. by saying it's absolutely imperative we stop crime everywhere else!

Most statements you made are fabricated or right wing talking points not based in any type of reality (JCPOA bad not complying [all evidence is against this]; "Iran is an existential threat" - Not to me or anyone I know of have ever met, not a single day of my life has gone by that I felt directly under threat by anyone in Iran).

It's all the same with you people, try and propagandize the rest of us with threats and doom about the death and destruction that will certainly come from these places half way around the world, while completely ignoring the death and destruction that the U.S. exports globally every single day. It's sickening.

There's a difference between soldiers stepping out of line in war versus behaving according to policy. War is never good. It's not really a strong argument to say hey, I've got all these disturbing photos that show the US is bad. Well, you could also show disturbing photos that make any country look bad. The point is the context and how it got to be that way.

China is sometimes referred to as a peer power, but in many ways they remain extremely far behind. That is both a good thing and a bad thing. Weak countries go to extremes. Strong countries who think they are stronger than they are, could potentially go to similar extremes to make up for that perception.

Not all crimes are equivalent, and not all crimes are actual crimes even if people call them crimes.

It's easier to dismiss people than to engage, but then you stop challenging yourself and navigating the differences to understand the world better. Sometimes I'm wrong, but I try to be correct and not purely for emotional satisfaction.

You don't get to call it "stepping out of line" if there are no consequences for doing so. See for example how the My Lai Massacre was handled[1]. The pattern continues when it comes to shooting down an airliner[2], an airstrike on a hospital[3] and many more cases.

If no-one ever gets more than a stern talking to, then clearly there is no line. These actions are as close to adhering to policy as you can get without saying it outright.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre#Investigation_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 (there is even less to see about the aftermath here: everyone got a medal)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike (this time someone was disciplined)

#1 looks like a case of poor incentives which were a little too flexible as a result of what they were up against from the guerilla fighters. every army has elements that can get out of control if not kept on a tight leash, the US is no different in that regard. the difference is that we will identify and correct it if we see it.

#2 looks like a legitimate accident. technology wasn't as good as it is now. there were apologies and payments to the Iranian families. it sounds like they tried to follow protocol.

you can look at other countries who have shot down commercial airliners to see that this wasn't unique to the US in any way. the difference is that we tried to communicate and verify first, when many other countries didn't.

#3 just looks like a largely human mistake, which was recognized by multiple people involved privately and publicly. it's possible if they picked coordinates and had a database of protected locations, it could've been flagged, but i don't know if something like that exists. the nature of some of these decisions is that they have to happen fast, but that means your process has to be really good to avoid mistakes.

you also didn't mention the case where we drone striked a vehicle with kids in it and we publicly apologized for it. these things do happen, but considering the extremely large number of strikes the US tends to do, these are relatively rare.

because our society does value truth when it matters, it usually makes it out if there is substance to it. in many other societies, the governments can just perpetually deny and anyone who disagrees will be jailed or killed. that doesn't mean we don't have secrets like anyone else.

This reminded me of a comment from CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou;

"It was my experience at the CIA where literally every Israeli prime minister since the 1980s would come to Washington, which they do all the time, and no matter who happened to be in the White House, they would say 'Please bomb Iran, please bomb Iran, please bomb Iran.' And every president would say 'We're not going to do that.' Until this president..." [39:15]

https://youtu.be/Dztm-FpDC0s?t=39m8s

Yeah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahlH32Lprto is a video from Peter Zeihan covering that exact topic.

Trump couldn't care less

Peter Zeihan was saying the same about the Russian invasion of Ukraine when that started, since Russia and Ukraine export fertilizer precursors... If there were famines they didn't make the news (but they might not regardless).

There's been massive food inflation since the Ukraine war. The petrol protests are starting in Africa and Asia. Like, this isn't headline news but it exists.

Tired of winning, can't take it anymore.

Trump flip-flops numerous times per day. I am beginning to think that "The Art of the Deal" was also always fake - he is unable to make a deal. Everyone sees this now.

Of course it was fake. It was ghostwritten (again, of course it was), and the ghostwriter is wracked with remorse. [1]

The idea that a chump who bankrupted a casino could outmaneuver the country that invented the term "checkmate" was always profoundly stupid... so of course, Trump's supporters lapped it up like antifreeze.

1: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-schwartz-trumps-ghostwrite...

It was always the Art of the BS, part of which is always to try to hide the fact that it is BS. But people fall for it and his minions often at least initially benefit from the same BS.

Just because somebody tells us they are not lying does not mean they are not. But some people believe it because it makes them feel great again.

> I am beginning to think that "The Art of the Deal" was also always fake

To me, the interesting part is that people used to believe it in the first place. Anything that I heard of the guy and his agenda 2025 or whatever it was called had some really weird points which America (and for what its worth, the world, who didn't have any say in the American election but is dragged into it as the prices of my gas station rise)

Was it the silos of internet in an ever-polarizing nation that created the perfect conditions for a trump-esque person to take political power?

I should read more American history but Reagan seems like a similar guy but the only difference seems to be the short-term vs long-term consequences in the damage of Reagan's trickle-onomics (note that Trump's damage is pretty irreparable as well)

Nobody believed it in the first place. If you asked any modern MAGGAT in 2014 what they thought of DJT, they'd probably call him some rich turd from New York, and would not give him the time of day.

Now he is still the exact same man, but to them, he is the second coming.

And still more than half of the USA voters believed him better than any other candidate. In fact, a decent chunk responded to his call for an insurgence when his previous presidency ended.

They can't be all total idiots. So what are they? I have never seen a decent deep analysis on why they behave like this. Afaik, they got the worst chances in the existing economy, and decided, as they are hurting anyway, they'll make the other half of the USA also hurt.

Question for every USAian: Someone must have thought deeper about it. Is there a decent book or long form internet article, readable by a more leftist public?

Trumps art of the deal is trying to forcefully create win-lose deals instead of win-win or win-neutral deals, which, not very surprisingly, leads to other sides then going for the lose-lose deal.

It's not important to win, but it is paramount to at least feel like someone else is loosing more.

You mean you once believed he was good at making deals or was that sarcasm?

If you knew anyone that worked on the other ends of those deals, you'd know that it was always a load of trash. He basically relied on people caving to threats. That tactic only works if the other side believes the threat is credible and that they actually have something to lose.

The art of the deal always seemed to be, (1) create a situation unfavourable to your opponent. (2) exploit their temporary weakness to force a coercive one sided deal.

Trump seems to be able to do that well enough in the normal business world. The thing is when it comes to countries its harder to get them to roll over because if a dictator looks too weak its off with their head. If you give a dictator the choice of ruling over an impovrished country or dying in a coup, they are going to choose the former. On top of that its hard to make international coercive deals stick. In the normal business world, you can sue if someone reneges. When it comes to countries, what are you going to do? Whine to the UN? Good luck with that. Countries can stick with deals when it suits them and forget about them when it no longer does. At worse that may not make countries want to make deals in the future, but if it was a coercive deal that doesnt matter much.

> Trump seems to be able to do that well enough in the normal business world

Eh it doesn't work any better in the business world really.

His only move is shameless bullying, belligerence, and vexatious lawsuits.

It works on some smaller parties who really don't want or can't afford drawn out disputes, but otherwise it usually backfires.

Man, the older I get, the more I think that second and third and fourth order effects are way more important than first order effects.

and therefor you will not be surprised to find out that there has been a very recent dramatic decline in the asking price for empty containers in areas that are primarily devoted to imports, as the empty can is not worth the cost to ship it back.

In this case it's because of the time it takes to load the empties because its more profitable to use the time sailing. Some ports have rules now forcing them to take back empties so the yards don't fill up.

which then leads to negative values for the cans, and makes it profitable for some trucking outfits to run "tiltload" container trucks, that can autonomously off load an empty can ,somewhere convienient or other wierdness where filling a can with an otherwise unprofitable comodity ,like hay, then drives a whole industry driven by water cost and the return value of cans, or scrap metal, and who knows what else, "half cut" cars, etc.

Dropping containers at the consumer end isn't that bad, at least when they're empty they're not that hard to move back on a truck and there are plenty of uses above scrap value for a container in seaworthy condition.

It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed, instead of the current system that essentially mandates unloading the container rapidly as soon as it shows up because an entire truck+driver is waiting for the unloading to complete.

For palletized loads it's easy to unload them into temporary space in the building they're delivered to, but not everything is palletized.

> It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed.

There are big forklifts for taking containers off trucks and stacking them. Some recipients buy in bulk, store for later use, and stack their own containers. But most distribution centers want to get the contents into pickable inventory and start selling it.

The US military does a lot of container stacking, because they want reserves, not a "just in time" supply chain. "Moving Mountains", by Gen. Gus Petronis, covers this. He handled logistics for the Gulf War.

Another common solution is to have the driver park and leave the container and chassis. Long-haul driver and tractor leave. Local movement is done with a "terminal tractor" or "yard goat", a mini tractor built for short trips. Those have a tight turning radius, good visibility, and low speed.[1] Like most buffering systems, it adds latency and consumes buffer space, while allowing more backlog.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_b2Rqe4Ug

Yes. The Port of Los Angeles had a huge problem with empties when Hanjin went bankrupt. Everybody thought the South Korean government would bail out Hanjin, one of the largest shipping lines. There was no bailout. Port of LA finally shipped most of the empties to Fontana, CA, an inland city which exists mostly to move freight around. Three freeways, two rail lines, Amazon and WalMart plants, and an auto mall that's all truck dealers.

If you want a used 20' container, they're under $1000 right now in the Fontana area. Probably much less in quantity.

We should standardize some "dual-container" format that can be formed out of disassembled containers.

Externalities always felt glossed over in economics. So yes this business will ruin the river for everyone but please direct your attention to this chart and look at all that producer surplus!

At a certain point, businesses and the world in general focus way too much on the directly measurable rather than the accountance of the immeasurable (downstream effects)

Although, I am all for a data driven world but somehow it is my opinion that we have ended up with the worse of both as combined with the goodhart's law, this measurable thing just ends up somehow getting manipulated for short term gains over real long term damages.

As is your case in the example, the business will ruin the river for everyone having severe damage both culturally and I think financially as well given downstream effects of all people depending upon that river.

But the business has externalized the losses to the people and the people have externalized the responsibility of the river to the government and the government believes in absolute free capitalism! (or sometimes the businesses give the government some money in the pocket ie. corruption. "Cost of doing business" they said.)

I am not against capitalism itself (that Adam smith proposed) but capitalism in its current form is definitely something... and surely some if not most of us might agree to the fact that system isn't working as intended (well not working if it was intended for us ie.)

One of my favorite readings from undergrad and grad school was "The Problem of Social Costs" by R. Coase. I'm sorry you think externalities are glossed over by economics, but Im excited to tell you that this is certainly not the case. Coase won the Nobel Prize in economics in large part for his work on externalities. They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics. It's definitely worth a read of you wish economics paid more attention to externalities:

https://www.law.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file/coase-...

They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics.

Leaving aside the fact that the Economics prize isn't actually a Nobel Prize, topics which historically haven't been given enough attention are exactly where the highest impact research takes place.

If externalities had always received the attention they deserved, Coase would have never received his prize, because his work would not have been so important.

Coase did his most relevant work in the 1950s, and it wasn't as if he invented the idea of externalities. It was first given serious academic weight in the 1890s, and Pigou created the concept of externality correcting taxes in the 1920s. His work was important because it proposed a more market based solution than Pigouvian taxes.

I think its safe to say that externalities are not, and were not, an ignored sector given more than a century of serious work, and the fact that it is covered in any intro level Econ course.

There's a wide gap between "ignored" and "received the attention they deserved".

Externalities arguably haven’t received the attention they deserve outside of economics, but I would disagree; what are climate change discussions, if not a discussion about externalities? Hell, just about any global issue is, in part, about externalities.

Inside of economics, they have more than 130 years of work, and are taught in any intro class.

If your argument is that we are bad at correcting for them, then yes. But that is different than not considering them.

> what are climate change discussions, if not a discussion about externalities?

Climate change has been discussed for well over a half century, yet one of the main priorities of the current administration has been to hamstring renewable energy and promote coal and oil. I think it's pretty fair to say the issue is being ignored.

Carbon tax, plastic bag tax, etc. are from the learnings from economic externalities that is applied to climate policy. Other non climate externalities based policies are sugar tax, alcohol/cigarette/drug tax, education, healthcare, etc.

Ignored by the administration, not by economists. The administration is a political body and proved over and over they don’t care at all about economists opinion (see everything from this admin about tariffs and trade policy)

I suspect the person you are replying to was not referring so much to academic economists as a whole (which would include Coase and Piketty and even probably Marx) but rather the mercenary subset of economists who get signal-boosted by powerful interests in order to promote the self-serving narrative of the day, and yeah, that subset of economists dodges subjects like inequality and externalities with more finesse and agility than Neo dodging bullets in the matrix.

You means guys like William "3°C rise in global temperature would reduce global GDP by approximately 2.1%" Nordhaus?

No, the USA wasn't crippled by over-investment on climate action. Trade and tax and social policy are where the mercenary think-tank economists did the damage.

The gutter mud soaked knife-fight practice of economics and the erudite study of economics is one of the more jarring discontinuities between how we talk about how something works and how it actually does.

The consideration of externalities that don't impact the bottom line is so alien to the real observation of the rites of capital that it might as well be written on the inside of a particularly boring rock in the oort cloud.

This is a bit like the critique of physics that they ignore friction.

It turns out that for many purposes friction and externalities are small enough that they can be ignored for most purposes.

Physicists and Economists are very aware of the tradeoffs.

Econ 101 often ignores side effects, but I don’t think economist has a whole ignore side effects. That’s like one of their main topics of study.

Externalities were a very big part of my first-year microeconomics course circa 2008, FWIW.

Decision makers ignore externalities. Economists definitely not, it’s pretty much what their field of study is about

Economics talks about externalities constantly, but nobody listens to them because people hate thinking about externalities.

Complex systems are dominated by feedback curves, but people insist on analyzing them by the forward transmission curves.

The separation between the cause and the effects are way less important than their polarity. High-order effects tend to be smaller, but they are also way more numerous, so things can cancel out or end-up resolved on either way.

i think this is a fascinating comment that highlights how tactical successes may turn to dust in the medium and long term - and also how the intention behind an action may often not be relevant to practical effects at all, since transitive consequences override the primary outcome (if it was even well calculated in the first place).

since this would be very meaningful for my understanding and reasoning about many social fields such as business or politics, i‘d like to know whether you have source material that supports the premise? is this a grounded concept or more of an ad hoc observation

I mean a move that will get you checkmated in one is bad, but there are a lot less of those than there are moves that will get you checkmated in 4 that are just as bad of an outcome for you.

I think you're over analyzing to some degree. The distribution and median outcome (1st through N order) was always negative for the course of action this administration has taken. The proponents try to sell people on the notion that this could all turn out great, which is way out on one end of the tail (e.g let's say 1% chance for sake of argument) for this action, and here we sit right around a median realized outcome for this kind of an intervention. I'd bundle all the N order effects up, then look how an aerial bombardment operation affects the liklihood of outcomes like the straight of hormuz being closed and/or controlled by iran, or iran surrendering the nuclear material and raising the white flag, etc...

You could probably do some simulations to see this was almost always going to be a losing strategy. Detailing the N order effects is good accounting, but the picture likely gets murkier the more you try to extrapolate N+1.

It appears that right now the administration is fighting desperately to achieve an international state like the one had under the prior nuclear deal with Iran... the one Trump tore up because it had Obama's name on it.

It's all petty BS and I really do hope the electorate gets it together.

Doing this analysis kind of requires knowing the probability of various events occuring. If we knew that, then world politics would be very different.

Like its easy to say in retrospect something is obvious, but it rarely is at the outset.

I was going to reply to this post with "surely shipping prices going up is a first order effect", but it's wrong. The real first order effect is the thousands of Iranian civilians (and fine, the hundreds of Iranian servicemen and the tens of American killers and their allies) whose families won't see them again.

Since the U.S. knew that Iran was 100% going to close Hormuz since Jimmy Carter, who also refrained from taking Kharg island precisely for that reason, the second order effects appear to be desired.

Otherwise they'd impeach Trump by now. Even if they make a 2 month ceasefire deal now, it will start again after that.

The U.S. should form a coalition with the neighboring countries and "finish the job" once and for all. Negotiations with Iran will always amount to kicking the can down the road.

The US are incapable of finishing the job. That's what they tried to do in Iraq and look how it turned out. Iran is much more organised, has a competent secret police, is huge and better armed than Iraq was. It's physically impossible to carpet bomb the country like Israel is trying to do to Lebanon, so whatever you do you can be sure that there will be plenty of armed partisans. If the central power disintegrates, there will be a mess of Kurdish forces, the remains of governmental armies, and you can expect other interesting groups to show up along the borders with Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if the US were lead by competent people with a decent strategy it would be worse than a long shot. And they are not.

They are also incapable of forming a coalition. They pushed the Saudis and all the Gulf states, who hate Iran with a passion to the moderate "maybe starting a war was not such a good idea" camp. The latest noises about forcing them to make friends with Israel is exactly what you would do if you wanted to be absolutely sure that they will never help you. The noises about annexing Greenland and Canada made sure that nobody in Europe is going to be part of any coalition there willingly.

That's what happens when you take stupid decisions on your own because you're a big bully boy and allies are for chumps.

Destroying what remains of their missiles and drones and forcibly reopening the straits is absolutely possible. Estimates vary, but so far about 50% of their offensive capabilities seem to have been destroyed. Continue combat operations and destroy the rest. Escort ships trapped in the Gulf out. Maintain the blockade on Iranian ports to apply maximum economic pressure on the theocracy. I don't care about the internal politics of Iran. If the country descends into chaos or civil war, so be it. Hopefully, this may result in a collapse of the so called Islamic Republic. It is for the Iranians to decide what government they want, so long as it does not interfere with global and in particular U.S. interests.

Iran going like Syria would certainly interfere with US and global interests.

> Destroying what remains of their missiles and drones and forcibly reopening the straits is absolutely possible.

They don’t need missiles to keep the Gulf pretty much closed, they just need drones. They have what, 1000 km of coast line with convenient mountains nearby? The choke point is 30 km wide, you don’t need more than shaheeds to prevent enough ships from sailing through that the others either stop trying or pay.

And you won’t prevent rockets or drones from reaching that coast line unless you have absolute control over the interior. Look at how much trouble Israel has with getting rid of rockets in the Gaza Strip.

> Continue combat operations and destroy the rest.

Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate that it is much easier said than done.

> Escort ships trapped in the Gulf out.

That is going to be very impractical as long as they can just send marine, submarine, or aerial drones. Not unfeasible, but very difficult. The Huthis are still making trouble in the Red Sea, and there is an actual coalition to deal wit them there. Being locals with this kind of terrain is a massive advantage. There is a reason why anybody sane was saying that it was a stupid strategy.

> Maintain the blockade on Iranian ports to apply maximum economic pressure on the theocracy.

Which also applies maximum pressure on most of the world. That will become untenable quickly. Of course, the Russians are happy, though.

> I don't care about the internal politics of Iran.

You cannot solve a problem if you don’t understand it and the situation that caused it. Bush thought he could and he was wrong. Trump thinks he can and he is deluded.

> this may result in a collapse of the so called Islamic Republic

And I thought you guys were against regime change and forever wars. In the real world, it caused a rally-around-the-flat effect and a hardening of the government’s position and its grip on the country. I hope the Iranians can get out of this nightmare at some point, but it is not a given, and it is not the strategy most likely to lead to that outcome.

> so long as it does not interfere with global and in particular U.S. interests

lol. The US serve only the oligarch class’ interest. If you are serious about that, fix your government. It might not be as dire as the Islamic republic, but it is disintegrating.

Absolute delusional take, considering that the US is not trustworthy as they started bombing twice during negotiations. Not to mention that the US keeps moving the goalpost every time Iran agrees, because the US gets its orders from Israel. The US should get out of the region. Enough havoc has been caused because of it.

What is "finish the job"? Iran is a large populous country that's mostly been a unified polity since Cyrus the Great. They are a different people and culture from their Arab neighbours - how will the Arabs rule and why will the Persians follow them? A colonial rule by the US will be more disastrous than the experience in Iraq or Afghanistan - in those days cheap autonomous drones didn't drop grenades on soldiers.

The present US President is smart enough to realise that now. In this case he let himself be misled by Israelis & their supporters that Iranians would rise up and replace their own Government. That indeed might have happened if the US had intervened when the Iranians were actually protesting some months before the present crisis. Now the US administration is looking for a way out without putting boots on the ground and Iran is looking to haggle on the price and for the US. this very business like cutting of ones losses is almost certainly the right move.

By finish the job you mean genecide of all Iranians or long term occupation and colonization? Those are only two finish the job options. And USA is incapable of either.

Also, it is impossibly to cooperate and make agreements with current USA. That limits the coalition options.

From the point of view of the people who would actually do it, the most important effect of impeaching Trump would be a messy political fight and likely losing reelection in November. The most important effect of not impeaching him is they get to stay in office. Everything else is unimportant by comparison.

The rest of the world suffering the stupidity of average the American voter.

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

They absolutely are

same here. gas is $6 in seattle; every business uses gas, explains the extreme cost of living. i'm going broke working for AWS.

I'm also seeing a vast array of smug comments from Seattle and Portland area personal electric car owners who don't realize that $7/gallon diesel affects Everything they purchase. My message to the smug EV owners is: Go hang out by the loading docks for your local grocery store for a full business day and tell me how many all-electric semi tractor/trailer trucks you see delivering product.

> i'm going broke working for AWS.

I don't want to pretend gas isn't getting expensive but let's be real, Amazon pays almost 200k for entry level positions in Seattle. If you earn that much and still feel you are going broke, then you are not short on money. You are short on common sense spending and budgeting skills.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

been here 6 years, making less than that first top left number, 190k.

idk what to do about it. every manager just gets a cheshire cat grin whenever i complain about it. i know i should boomerang but ugh.

TC? Or base pay?

tc less than 190k. in this year's salary meeting thing in april, i asked my manager if they were trying to get rid of me lol.

The hallmark of anti-intellectualism is to insist something is far simpler than they've been told, dismantle it and then find out why it was the way it was.

If you're an engineer, you've experienced something similar. You come across some code and scratch your head thinking "why did they do it like this?", spend half a day getting rid of it and then find out why it was the way it was.

There are people who understand all these complex systems. We just insist on silencing them, even firing them and then listening to the dumbest people on the planet.

You see this in startups too, even very large ones. I've now spent years watching people in crypto discover why exactly the financial system works like it does while spewing banalities about "disruption". Sometimes new thinking can be good but more often than not it's somewhere between ignorance and a scam, particularly when so much money is involved.

Another classic example: orbital data centers.

It doesn't have to be that way. The Chinese Communist Party is, despite the name, technocratic [1]. Xi Jinping's undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering.

[1]: https://issues.org/perspective-the-benefits-of-technocracy-i...

ok, but is electing trump a 1st order or 4th order effect

Unintended consequences are indeed a bitch.

Nate Hagens [1] often talks about a wider-boundary view and nth-order effects. I find it both informative and enlightening as well as thought-provoking.

[1] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/141-...

Anyone tried to buy paint recently?

$611 for 2x 5 gallon buckets just to do my garage.

God bless the Trump administration. Sounds like that’s a bunch of my summer task list checked off as No Longer Viable.

Dunno, it depends on what brand that is. $60 per gallon sounds about where Sherwin Williams paint has been for a while.

I spent $111 for two quarts

You just discovered why your gdp is so high... American prices make no fucking sense to me, some of your double car garages are more expensive than a full high end house in central Europe

People just make a lot more money in America. A decent job these days starts at $200k. That's fresh out of college or shortly after. Obviously not everyone makes that much, but it's not unusual at all in tech.

> but it's not unusual at all in tech.

But tech workers are a tiny sliver of the population so no, $200k starter jobs are extremely unusual in USA.

Even among tech (incl big tech) workers, most entry level eng are not starting at $200k

> People just make a lot more money in America. A decent job these days starts at $200k.

This is an extremely HN specific and tech industry specific comment. Go for a day-long drive through middle America, like from Nebraska to Wyoming or something, and 95%+ of the people you will see are living on less than $60,000 total family income per year. A very small selection of very specific jobs start at $200k a year.

These people are in a massive bubble. People with STEM degrees from good schools even with a few decades of experience would often consider $200K in compensation pretty good in a lot of places in the US in a lot of jobs. The developers at Facebook (who are still employed) are really the exception.

> A decent job these days starts at $200k.

Bruh

> That's fresh out of college or shortly after.

Bruh

> Obviously not everyone makes that much, but it's not unusual at all in tech.

Triple bruh.

Maybe in some heavy tech based tiny regions like SF or NYC.

Even in second tier tech hubs like Boston new grads are doing great if they break 120k.

And tech jobs are a small minority of all jobs. The only way I could understand your description of a “decent job” is if you think the vast majority of jobs aren’t decent, much less good.

Total comp is complicated etc. etc. But, yeah, even in markets like the broad Boston area--I'm not in HR--but $200K would seem like a really good salary for someone just out of school. And I did have salary discussions at work when I had a lot of experience and I did seem comfortable but not in the ridiculously high range some people seem to throw around.

Total comp in most companies isn’t complicated.

Most companies either don’t give equity or aren’t public and you can value those options with their twelve levels of caveats at effectively zero. The bonus component is the most common portion of compensation that actually varies from year to year and isn’t a large fraction of anyone’s comp unless they are high up in the company hierarchy.

Edit: and to be clear, 200k in a market like Boston is a good/great compensation for _anyone_. It would be amazing for a first job out of school. The original poster saying 200k was what decent jobs started at is incredibly out of touch.

Benefits factor in too as do various other things including bonuses and RSUs at public companies but I don't really disagree in general. For most people, base salary is often your comp and something over $100K is probably the norm for a good professional job.

I find it interesting that only a few days ago you were arguing that oil is very important because EVs are too expensive and nobody can afford them.

So is America rich or poor? Because Europeans, that you claim to be dirt poor, can afford EVs just fine?

All of these statements are true. America is far richer than Europe overall. Oil is still immensely important, and energy independence is clearly important for strategic reasons. EVs are also still too expensive. The Slate truck might change that, but until then a used gas car probably makes more sense unless you really value the EV driving experience and are willing to spend the money for it.

Wow you are out of touch. A decent job in the US is not paying $200k

* p50 ~$66,000

* p75 ~$102,000

* p90 ~$155,000

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2026/median-weekly-earnings-109...

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t09.htm

War insurance rates for shipping has also gone up: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/business/strait-hormuz-sh...

Calling increased shipping costs due to rising fuel prices a "side effect" of an oil crisis, seems odd to me. Isn't that the expected main effect?

I’d hardly consider this a side effect. Decreasing traffic in one path within a network of exchange has the direct effect of increasing traffic/demand on alternate paths. Increased demand == increased prices.

people don't realize how cheap shipping via containers had become.

& this increased commerce all around the globe.

but destroyed due to bad propaganda.

click on YTD on this graph

* https://en.macromicro.me/charts/94482/imf-strait-of-hormuz-n...

(screenshot https://images2.imgbox.com/cd/73/yMf1mwKy_o.png )

every 1 single day = another 1 week of misery for the world

100 ships per day now single digits sometimes zero

90 days = 90 weeks

except it's going to be still like this in SIX MONTHS if not all the way through January 2029

wait until Cuba happens some Friday night too

Can't someone take all possessions of Trump, Hegseth etc... and redistribute this to middle and lower class folks? I fail to see why I have to pay for increasing prices due to the actions of those guys. This is literally a racketeering scheme for milking us via increase of prices. A few get very rich, just as Smedley Butler pointed out many decades ago - even he would be shocked at the level of milking going on here.

vote

I believe democracy is about a bit more than voting what is presented to you.

like what?

You are asking for your own Lenin.

Wasn’t Steve Bannon too?

Not to get all fatalistic, but: What’s the point in getting revenge on these people in particular? The voters have made it clear that there’s about eight years at most, typically less, before they’ll rally behind some new grifters and need to repeat the complete set of coursework from scratch.

As the saying goes: “The voters know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard”

One contributing reason politics became this bad is that politicians were rewarded for exactly this behavior. By gentlements agreement there was no accountability and no punishment - and no sex impeachment with bad faith performative pretense you care dont count.

That is why. Because if you dont "take revenge" things will get worst. Because not taking revenge made conservatives know the strategy works.

We all have to pay for the actions of these guys because they were voted into power. Americans had the opportunity to avoid this but decided they wanted more of it, and now they're getting it. Elections have consequences.

Honestly, The Internet created this.

No, internet was just another media added to the list.

Reagan was elected before general Internet availability.

I don't know. Trump's popularity was definitely fueled by the social media. QAnon started as a meme on 4chan.

I think it's a mistake to overstate the effect but it's definitely there and it seems different than even Obama's use of social media, which was considered revolutionary at the time.

Of course there is no way to prove it but when you go from a few broadcasting institutions to a situation where everybody is a broadcaster, then we should not be surprised to see some pretty wild effects that the inventors of democracy certainly didn't think of in 500 B.C.

Another part of the new price of oil and Trump's tariffs earlier is that they are a regressive tax. Poor people have to pay more in terms of percentage of their income now.

Trump often said "Tariffs is the most beautiful word". I think he said that because he thought his followers were too stupid to realize that he was transferring tax-burden from the rich to the middle-class and poor. That's why he thought they were "beautiful". They enabled him to gaslight people.

American people are not stupid but many of us have to work hard so there's not a lot spare time nor energy to try understand what is actually happening. Fox News is misleading us purposefully playing emotional tricks on patriotic Americanss.

Now import-companies should get back the tariffs they paid. But does it mean they will lower their prices? Probably not.

The next time they'll elect Vance or some other dipshit. It's idiocracy in real life, and nothing surprising given the American education system... ~25% of functionaly illiterate voters

> As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron

I genuinely think it's necessary to bankrupt the Trump family. If the family (and especially Trump himself) exits office with all the wealth he's stolen then it sets a clear example to Bezos, Musk, Gates or any other wealthy individual to buy the presidency so they can loot the coffers to multiply their wealth.

America as an organization needs to stand up and get retributive with robbing government coffers or it'll just breed even more kleptocracy.

They go bankrupt, they get a 10B dollar tax deduction :)

>The net worth of Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, is not publicly known. For decades, Forbes has assessed his wealth, currently estimating it at $6.5 billion as of February 2026.[1][2]

6,500,000,000 / (350,000,000 * 0.99) = $18.76

don't spend it all in one place, champ!

I'll frame the check for it's symbolism

The funny thing is that we don't need to speculate about many of the effects of this because it's already happened but nobody really paid attention to it. I am talking about the Trump 2020 OPEC deal.

First, some context. OPEC/OPEC+ generally set their production to meet demand and to keep oil prices stable. That means they aim for a floor and ceiling on oil prices. Every 3 months they meet and try and anticipate demand. Produce too much and the price is too low. This hurts revenue. Produce not enough and it creates political instabilities, both locally and abroad. It would in particular hurt security guarantees with the US that go back to FDR and King Faisal making an oil-for-security deal in 1945. Now, that doens't mean OPEC members can't and don't cheat. They can and do. But it is generally successful [1].

In January-February 2020 we had the start of the pandemic. A lot of people weren't paying attention or thought it could be contained. That was over by March 2020 and much of the world went into lockdown. A lot of travel just stopped. This had an immediate effect on the oil market. Nobody was buying. Nobody had places to store excess oil. Russia and Saudi Arabia got into an oil price war. And the futures price briefly went negative [2]. This technically was an extreme contango market [3].

So what did the Trump administration do? Well, in my estimation, they panicked. They feared this would be devastating to US oil producers. So then-president Trump went to MBS and cajoled him into getting OPEC to massively cut oil production [4][5]. How much? Initially by 9.7 million barrels per day and then going down over the next 2 years to 6.3 million. That's roughly 10% of global crude oil output.

When I say "panicked", because of the OPEC meetings every 3 months, this would've happened anyway. OPEC would've cut production. The market would've stabilized. Instead, Trump locked OPEC into a 2 year cut and essentially gave them permission to drive up oil prices. And that's exactly what happened. This deal maps pretty much exactly to the pandemic inflation spike.

And nobody talks about it. Republicans were keen to blame Biden. Democrats chose to blame "greedy" oil companies even though no amount of US production could replace what OPEC had cut. Biden even went to Riyadh to beg MBS to increase production and he refused [6]. And nobody talks about any of it.

That was 10%. The Hormuz closure is 15-20% and also impacts natural gas, helium, fertilizer and a bunch of other things not impacted by the OPEC deal. Oil is being kept at a futures price of ~$100/barrel by record withdrawals from strategic reserves. By early July, those strategic reserves will be empty and there'll be no way to inject oil back into the market other than reopening the Strait. And that will lag weeks because oil container ships move as fast as bicycles.

So think back to the pandemic. Shipping containers 6x'ed. Gas prices went way up. It impacted jet fuel and sea freight. All of that is coming in the next month or two and there's honestly little we can do about it now. If the Strait reopened today, these second and third order effects are already baked in.

This is now a structural repricing event and we're going to see crude oil and gas prices near current levels probably for years.

Oh and oil CEOs are starting to warn about the coming energy shock [7][8] so buckle up.

[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...

[2]: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/PDF/IN1135...

[3]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/contango.asp

[4]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...

[5]: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/trump-touts-great-saud...

[6]: https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114185/documents/...

[7]: https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/chevron-ceo-drops...

[8]: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/exxon-warn...

> And that will lag weeks because oil container ships move as fast as bicycles.

IIRC there’s also major long-term supply destruction happening, because wells have to be capped around the Persian Gulf since the tanks are full.

Resuming production is also going to take years. Every bit of oil storage inside the Strait is at maximum capacity. All of the wells have had to stop producing because there is nowhere for the oil to go. When wells stop, it can take a long time to ramp up the production to previous levels -assuming it can ever again resume its prior peak output. Additionally, several key bits of infrastructure (trains, refineries) have been damaged and cannot be easily repaired.

> By early July, those strategic reserves will be empty

The US SPR is at 365m barrels and has a max withdrawal rate of 4m bpd. Currently they’re withdrawing 9m/week. There is 0 chance reserves are gone by July, just incredibly incorrect.

A predictable FAFO event due to US global aggression, forced on the world by Israel and putting America last, as usual.

The most surprising thing is that the whole world somehow has built dependency on Hormuz which has been known for decades that it is controlled by Iran, an adversarial actor to the west.

Nobody ever thinks of, you know, building redundancy for Hormuz?

> Nobody ever thinks of, you know, building redundancy for Hormuz?

When you have questions like that in mind, the answer is pretty much always „yes, that’s a well known topic of discussion in that field“

You can see alternatives that exist here: https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/alternative-routes/

(Really neat website, I think it was shared on HN a few months ago?)

There is a lot of other proposed routes but it’s actually pretty hard to create them in that region, lots of actors with their own interests and not the best history of collaboration. And Iran would definitely be against it given it reduces their influence

Pipelines are also easily targeted, should an adversary wish to destroy one. There is no way to protect hundreds of miles of static infrastructure.

They are also relatively easy to repair, and somewhat hard to hit given they are under ground.

They actually have. I think both Saudi Arabia and UAE have built pipelines to bypass the strait.

Not to mention USA investing heavily in fraking to counter balance the middle east...

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