I can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war. We have
* Demonstrated that the US simply can't offer any meaningful security guarantee to it's middle east partners.
* Permanently ceded de facto control over the straits of Hormuz to Iran
* Significantly strengthened the hardliners in the Iranian regime and cleared the way for them to have absolute power by eliminating all moderates
* Spiked inflation at home and doubled down on pissing off pretty much every single country except Russia by heaping sky rocketing energy costs on them
* Exposed the perilous state of of the defense industrial base (in spite of us spending more than the next 10 countries combined). We simply can't produce enough military hardware to sustain a sustained conflict with a country like Iran. I shudder to think just how badly we will be outmatched in a shooting war with China.
All of this to get to a point where we are negotiating a deal which is worse than what we already had with the JCPOA.
I think we will look back on this as the US version of the Suez crisis, the beginning of the end of the US empire.
The US oil industry is making massive amount of money directly from the people of the US on the inflated prices, since their domestic supply and refineries are unaffected. It also perfectly matches the actions a foreign country trying to harm the US would take. There's so many terrible options to choose from!
The west coast doesn’t actually have pipelines to receive oil from the mountain/Midwest regions, and Alaska has been declining for a while now. So California mostly gets oil from Brazil (not affected) and Iraq (affected).
There are much easier ways of increasing the oil prices that don't have as much drawbacks as trump's war. Of course, for _some_ reason most people and countries prefer _lowering_ oil prices.
The saving grace is that China (well modern living CCP members) have never had an armed conflict. China's military ranks are people who got there by playing politics and bending exercises to their benefit rather than showing battlefield competence. There are no war vets or experienced players.
So while they might have incredible man power and manufacturing capability, everyone in that first battle will be seeing battle for the first time in their life.
China is even worse than Russia on that matter. Before the invasion to Ukraine, Russia was heavily involved in Syria, Chechnia and other conflicts and with that experience it failed miserably.
China, with all its posturing, military wise is even worse than Russia. That's why all it can do is propaganda war on social media to weaken American society.
The flip side is that the US isn't used to fighting anything other than asymmetric warfare / insurgencies / terrorism against people who can't project force and can't really hit back. We park valuable assets out in the open on military bases and installations around the world, and don't do anything to shelter them or even move them around during a conflict because of hubris.
Iran also basically just fought us to a stalemate, with an arguably long-term strategic victory going to Iran, just by being willing to absorb more punishment in the short term. Once we depleted our stocks of expensive weaponry we had to stop. We could win every fight and still lose the war.
> Iran also basically just fought us to a stalemate, with an arguably long-term strategic victory going to Iran, just by being willing to absorb more punishment in the short term. Once we depleted our stocks of expensive weaponry we had to stop. We could win every fight and still lose the war.
Iran had a different victory condition. All they had to do was outlast and not be completely wiped out. Trump's victory condition was... well, only Trump knows. Short of a total ground invasion of Iran and full eradication of the Iranian regime (a tall, tall order), victory for the US in Iran, in the eyes of the public, was always going to be impossible.
This is a war that even the deep state US military-intelligence complex had been resisting starting for decades. That really demonstrates what a colossally bad idea it was.
Trump seemed to think that the Iranian regime was unstable and would fall once the US killed their top ranks and applied a bit of pressure. Turns out that he was very wrong (and experts would have told him if he had bothered to ask / listen).
IMO the last point is a definitely plus. Defense procurement is a feeding trough for the incumbents. Exposing the current state is a required first step for any meaningful transition (not sufficient and will probably not happen this time, but required nevertheless). My 2c.
Short, medium and long-term this will spur the world to move off of fossil fuels. I'm not a fan of war, especially this stupid one, but that one benefit may be, unintentionally, worth it.
In the short term, Trump is actually paying people to stop existing solar and wind projects and is not exactly open to new ones starting up. So.. oil it is then.
If you look at it from a world rather than USA perspective, expensive oil is encouraging other countries to buy new energy tech and EVs from China. It was probably going to happen anyways, but Trump sped it up.
I'm sure you've at least heard what the United States' leaders have to say. To paraphrase Trump, "stopping nuclear proliferation to a group of lunatics that support terrorism". And also (still paraphrasing Trump), "the US doesn't need this as much as the rest of the world." So, perhaps this doesn't put the US ahead relative to other countries, but it puts them ahead of the counterfactual nuclear wasteland they could become.
Whether or not you believe the United States' leaders, whether or not you think there was a better way for them to achieve their goals (something something Obama deal) is up for debate. But it's very facetious to say you "can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war," when the United States' leaders have been publicly announcing it for nearly a year.
It's actually very difficult to implement a change in our timeline on such a complex issue without causing a mix of positive and negative effects relative to your desired goal. It's very hard to impute whether anyone in the White House actually had a successful causal motive->plan->implementation->effect loop deliberately, but there are always high points, even of grotesque failure.
Obviously it's not NET positive, but if I had to highlight one positive for the US from their perspective, setting most of our guided munitions on fire overnight breaks the military, and the suspicion is that it breaks the military at a time when China is not quite yet prepared to invade Taiwan. It is now in a widely acknowledged catastrophic munitions stockpile crisis which Congress will have to fix via large, sustained investment; Increasing procurement rates for many systems by an order of magnitude on the low end. A year ago, and 10 years ago, and 25 years ago, it was in a severe munitions stockpile crisis according to everyone who's ever ran a wargame or tried to figure out deterrence policy for a non-nuclear shooting war
After the Cold War, we basically reduced most munitions stockpiles to a level consistent with a Desert Storm scale operation, but kept paying exorbitant amounts of money to keep defense contractors technically alive, producing a handful of units a year at costs that pay for the overhead of existing. In areas like naval procurement, the contradictions entailed by this approach combined with neoliberal austerity posturing and a lackadaisical response to delays, have combined to turn almost every major shipbuilding effort since the Cold War into an expensive failure. We are spending a remarkable amount of money on military equipment and probably getting 5% of what we would get if we spent twice that much and emphasized industrial performance rather than contractor sustainment.
A year ago, Congress and the Pentagon were carefully ignoring this for political reasons, while the MIC & foreign policy blob believes China was looking at it as an opportunity.
> It is now in a widely acknowledged catastrophic munitions stockpile crisis which Congress will have to fix via large, sustained investment;
How exactly is it positive to waste munition and thus force the congress to buy new munition? You will spend a huge amount of money to ... get where you was.
Printing munitions is not as long as scaling up production to print up munitions. Russian war showed that it will be too late to scale anything once the enemy trench in.
Until this year, US military bases were seen as an asset. They were thought to deter attacks, and in the case of someone being crazy enough to attack the country that hosted a US military base, they sold the promise of a quick and decisive response.
But for countries in the Middle East, every base was nothing but a liability with nothing but a long list of detriments. The bases got attacked and destroyed with basically zero effort whatsoever, local militaries had to step up to defend the US bases on their own dime and with their own people putting their lives on the line, and the bases basically just served as provocation and ended up with the countries being attacked as "punishment" for letting the US military operate on their land. And the US put in the bare minimum effort, if any, to defend the countries being attacked. It was basically "that's on you. Buzz off".
Europe is now being threatened with having their US bases cut back/removed entirely and I'm not sure if people are even worried anymore. People have been using the term "paper tiger" to refer to Russia these past 4 years because their efforts at war have been absolutely embarrassing. Somehow the US has made Russia look competent, and despite being against all the BS America did in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, I didn't think America would somehow show itself to be more rotted out from the inside than Russia. I always assumed the US was competent, albeit war hungry. But somehow competence has completely vanished.
And right now, East Asian allies of the US operate under the very wrong assumption that the US will back them up if China/Russia/North Korea tries something. And now that those countries know the US won't do shit, there's a non zero chance that they've taken war plans from purely hypothetical plans to "we could actually do this" plans.
The situation in Europe is even more crazy. The US needs the bases in Europe to project power in the Middle East. If every country in Europe would ask the US to leave then the US would have a very serious issue projecting power around the world.
The US bases are also pretty expensive to set up. Lots of logistic support has to be in place to let those bases function. That require a lot of support from the host country. Normally, you would expect the US to be friendly with the host countries, but that seems lost on the current administration.
What is really wrong is that it is known that russia is fighting in Ukraine with drones designed in Iran. And we have seen how hard it is for US designed weapons to deal with those drones. To the point that a lot of development is happening in Ukraine to deal with this problem.
By attacking Iran, the US has shown the world that Ukraine is the weapon supplier of choice against future drone wars.
Yeah, the US is trying to peddle massive missiles that individually cost as much as the entire defense budget for some small nations, as well as large boats that are just giant sitting ducks. Ukraine is showing that cheap drones are the best defensive asset to have and are currently difficult to counter. China is always flaunting their drone shows, and there's no doubt they've got a defensive/offensive fleet of them ready to go and the US seems to be making zero efforts at making any sort of defense against them. There's been plenty of time to learn from Ukraine and the US military industrial complex is just twiddling their thumbs and sucking up money for more of last century's tech
> The bases got attacked and destroyed with basically zero effort whatsoever, local militaries had to step up to defend the US bases on their own dime and with their own people putting their lives on the line
As a US citizen, I hope more countries come to this realization and start rejecting these.
It's such a lose-lose for everyone
The establishment and maintenance of these bases cost the tax payers so much....
If only we could refocus this massive expenditure of resources to internal domestic infrastructure...
The America First MAGA people fail so hard to understand that these expenditures on things like foreign bases and US Aid resulted in far greater returns for us. It's never been about altruism or the greater good.
I say this as an anti-empirical leftist with no great sympathy for the effort, but for those proclaiming to put America's interests above all else it's just such an obvious and idiotic short-sighted self-own.
US Aid has probably been the biggest ace the US ever had in its hand.
US farmers growing otherwise unprofitable crops with no buyer? Check.
US exporters being able to export crops? Check.
US Aid workers being able to give food to starving people in countries that have huge deposits of rare earth materials? Check.
US intelligence apparatus having advanced knowledge of developing situations in strategically important countries? Check.
US Aid workers being able deliver tremendous goodwill to countries that China or Russia would love to have their tentacles in? Check.
Everyone's happy, everyone makes money, everyone eats.
Yet Donald Trump and Elon Musk don't like it, so away it goes. And there's no adult in the room to say "no, you're not cutting it, here's why".
>The establishment and maintenance of these bases cost the tax payers so much....
They supported USA's hegemony, extension of soft powers - essentially (not a quote) 'we trade with USA because they're our partner, they help us with defence against tyrants'. Except, when USA vote in a fascist tyrant.
Many bridges have been burned.
USA is just like a company taken over by venture capitalists, and just like such a company those capitalists look like they'll run it into the ground and make off with all the money.
European here (from Spain), and the overwhelming majority of people I know are hoping for the removal of the bases. They are worried, yes... worried that it's just grandstanding and it's not really going to get done (which is likely, because those bases have always been there mainly for the benefit of the US).
It's not over yet, but the status quo is certainly a loss for the US. Which to me indicates Trump won't stop here, he needs something he can at least spin as a win.
I think Trump is about to lose patience with Iran again and we're in for a second phase of this war. What that looks like afterwards is anyone's guess. I'm not very optimistic.
It's not impossible that if the IRGC can't make payroll that things start to change from the inside, like what happened in Serbia. I'm not going to bet on that outcome though.
I might agree but would wait until the highly enriched uranium situation is resolved, because if Iran gets to keep their approx 1000lbs all they have to do is make a simple gun-type device and sail it into New York City. It's pretty easy. If the HEU is extracted from Iran it makes everything worth the pain, and also fyi Trump ran on the issue so it should be no surprise to anybody. I also note that people complaining about depleting US munitition stockpiles are nowhere to be found when the issue of Ukraine is brought up, and all the material we give (and will give) to them.
And the reason no one brings up Ukraine is because we used more interceptors in three days than were sent to Ukraine in the entire 4+ years of war. It’s a complaint that doesn’t make sense unless one is jd Vance.
Why would you think returning to Obama's Iran deal would be a win? Actually, let me word this better: how could you possibly think that anyone in the White House for the past decade would think returning to Obama's Iran deal is better than this war?
The reason it's so incredible you could think such a thing is the White House has been saying how horrible that deal was in every interview for months, and of course intermittently for a decade.
What do you mean delivery tech? Your delivery tech is a cargo ship. We're not talking about an ICBM that requires sophisticated re-entry materials. We are talking about a crude gun-device like Hiroshima, which is actually pretty easy if you google it.
Then the causal chain is War in Iran -> Oil Price increase -> Inflation & Fed Rate fears -> Treasury sell-off. Geopolitical risk creates inflation shock, and if bonds sell off on war news, their utility as a portfolio hedge weakens, and capital holders start looking for new assets (stocks and property). Also, the exodus from bonds first results in a pile of sidelined capital whose eventual rotation into stocks and property and gold leads to more market instability down the road.
Also, Russian and Iranian windfall oil profits are up along with those of Exxon, Chevron, Shell etc., the arms producers like Lockheed are booming, and for some reason, ‘prediction markets’ (gambling interests) also:
i dont understand why the hardliners are bad they were right. the war waged against them was threatened to be nuclear "an entire civilization will die tonight". the country threatening iran unjustly is indeed the great satan. no justification except for being egged on by our hyper aggressive expansionist apartheid proxy israel. we should pay reparations.
> I can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war.
I wouldn't jump to conclusions yet. The war is not over. I wouldn't even be so sure as to say Iran is in a good place right now.
Iran can absorb more pain than the US, but even that has a deadline. For the US, the only pain is inflation, which is more a matter of political capital than anything tangible. Trump is a lame duck president so I think he's more than happy to spend his political capital on this.
It's different for Iran. The main concern with a prolonged conflict is a lack of oil storage space. Once the tanks are full you have to cap the wells which is nigh disastrous for Iran because of the cost and difficulty of reactivating those wells later on.
To be clear, I'm not saying the US is going to come out victorious. But war is complex and it's a folly to predict any outcomes this early on.
> Iran can absorb more pain than the US, but even that has a deadline.
It doesn't. This is the western mentality, thinking you are dealing with sane people.
I'm from Iran (now living in the West), there's a famous Shia motto: "Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala".
Around 30% of the population are die hard IRGC supporters, another 10% are neutral and the rest don't like the regime.
The problem is that, the war has caused a major rally around the flag effect.
The IRGC has more support than ever now. It's a battle for the Iran now against United States, attempting to destroy people's homes.
I'm not a fan of IRGC. My 20 year old cousin was captured and tortured in Evin prison for 6 months during the Mahsa uprising in 2022 [3]. You can't imagine how much I hate them, but I love Iran more. If I was there, I would be fighting the Americans right now.
Iranians are not going give up, right now, you will have to kill all 90M of us to "win".
> It doesn't. This is the western mentality, thinking you are dealing with sane people.
I'm not talking about sanity. I understand that the IRGC is greater than the sum of the parts and that no individual life matters.
I'm talking about the oil wells. The IRGC may not care about human life, but you need money to stay in power. Money that will disappear the longer you can't sell your oil and the more oils you have to cap.
> The problem is that, the war has caused a major rally around the flag effect.
I don't believe you. Do you have proof? Iran is pretty damn closed off from the rest of the world so I have a hard time believing that you have some great insider knowledge about this.
> I'm not a fan of IRGC. My 20 year old cousin was captured and tortured in Evin prison for 6 months during the Mahsa uprising in 2022 [3]. You can't imagine how much I hate them, but I love Iran more. If I was there, I would be fighting the Americans right now.
I don't believe you. I'd believe you saying that you'd be against America, but not that you'd be fighting them. If that were true, why are you not traveling to Iran to join the IRGC right now?
That is not correct and the comment you replied to even pointed out several ways it hurt the US other than that
Inflation is the only Immediate pain. The other harms will play out over years.
While war games already predicted we’d run out of basically all defensive and offensive weapons almost immediately in a confrontation with China, that wasn’t demonstrated yet. Now it has been proven, but not even with China, with much smaller and less powerful Iran. We used a major portion of our stuff, it didn’t accomplish anything major, and now we’re already depleted like a paper tiger.
> While war games already predicted we’d run out of basically all defensive and offensive weapons almost immediately in a confrontation with China, that wasn’t demonstrated yet. Now it has been proven, but not even with China, with much smaller and less powerful Iran. We used a major portion of our stuff, it didn’t accomplish anything major, and now we’re already depleted like a paper tiger.
This is a positive, not a negative. It's a needed wake up call and better to get it now instead of during a war with China.
Besides inflation, American has other problems like running out of missiles and bombs. This war is about attrition, and American weapons are being attrited faster than Iranian ones.
The war is not over, but I would not count out the Iranians going for another strategic goal not mentioned in the GP post: make is so that the American president that attacked Iran loses the midterm big time.
It doesn't matter who "wins" the war, it's already a strategic loss for the US, like every single conflict the US went into since ww2. If they can't just blow the problem away with bombs they invariably and inevitably fuck it up, and as it turns out you can't bomb away that many problems
> like every single conflict the US went into since ww2
Depends on how you connect conflicts to strategic aims. The US won the cold war. Could they have done so without all the military conflicts? Further, what's the best way to maintain a strong fighting force? By fighting. The US needs wars to maintain it's fighting muscle.
No, they wouldn't, and they don't have it because they have chosen not to. There is something called an escalation ladder: you do not threaten to leave or kill your partner just because she spilled milk on your floor. That is the same reason Russia did not use nukes, and why other nuclear armed countries involved in conflicts have also avoided using them. The same logic applies here. Another example is that the US could bomb the Kharg island containing Iran's oil infrastructure, but that would be a major escalation. Iran would then have no reason to show restraint and could bomb the oil infrastructure of the Gulf states, creating a worldwide crisis.
I find it so interesting that you believe the Supreme Leader was a moderate. Also that somehow, the almost complete dismantling of the Iranian military resulted in Iran having more control over the straits of Hormuz. "The end of the US empire" so dramatic! fun stuff
The US was not supposed to come out ahead. This is crony capitalism. Think about all the money Trump JR can make selling drones and all the VC companies benefiting from defense spending!
Well, European partners are looking, too - and they are drawing logical conclusions, such as producing more interceptors locally rather than wait years for the first batches of PAC-3.
Probably going to juice EV sales is the only positive I'm taking away from this. Trump might end up being the person who tipped the balance and kills the ICE car.
(Once ICE cars fall below a certain percentage, they will have structural disadvantages to EVs because ICE engines are so expensive to design.)
When the position of the United States gets hurt, it means "liberals" get hurt - where "liberal" means anybody who might believe in lofty ideals like Constitutional rights or simply hasn't thrown in their lot with a hollow New York con man. I have tried and tried to steelman, but from everything I can tell this is really the only concrete policy mandate behind Trumpism. It's a death cult. Heaven's Gate didn't think they were killing themselves either.
>I can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war.
The stock market did, which is amazing if you're the top 10% of asset owners who own 50% of the country's wealth.
>except Russia by heaping sky rocketing energy costs on them
Russia doesn't benefit from this energy spike, since its biggest customers, China and India, have long term contracts that Russia can't just rip and renegotiate to charge spot prices, since they're in a pickle right now and depend on imports to keep the war going while not being able to sell to too many nations so they're stuck watching potential earnings go past them.
> Data suggests that Moscow has already made billions of dollars of additional
> revenue from oil sales because of higher crude prices, as well as the fact
> that the United States temporarily rescinded sanctions on Russia to rein in
> global costs
They probably had a few stock owners in mind, which came ahead and keep coming ahead with strategically planned transactions placed right before another US major move - all by pure coincidence of course.
Those are real wages. We would expect to see that during a sudden jump in inflation. Wages tend to lag inflation.
The other interesting part in that article is that excluding fuel and food still shows 2.8% inflation - only 1% attributable to food and fuel. Makes it seem like the main article and this article have different spins.
Edit: Wow people are jumping on this. The point is that food and fuel increases account for about 26% of the overall inflation number, meaning that the bulk of inflation is not related directly to fuel. The original article makes it it seem different.
I will say, this past inflation spike has completely broken the assumptions I had from 1970s economics that employers would raise their 'cost of living' raises to keep pace with inflation. My employer seems to think 2.5% is fine, as they've done it multiple years in recent past with only one extraordinary year netting 4%. I am now very skeptical of any so called 'wage price spiral'
> I am now very skeptical of any so called 'wage price spiral'
The wage-price spiral now happens when people move. I've definitely noticed that average salaries for my role (data person) have increased singificantly since 2020 or so.
What do you mean by this? If adding food and fuel raises CPI by 1%, then the food and fuel prices have necessarily raised by _more_ than the combined 3.8%.
Fuel and food are excluded from core inflation not because they're unimportant (they are in fact incredibly important) but because they are much more volatile in price--going up and down in bigger increments--so that you get a more stable view of inflation by excluding them.
But it's a bit of a nasty trick because food, in particular, has inflated in price a lot the past 3 years. Some items, like sugar, are legitimately double the price they were.
Most SWEs are not top 5%. The median is about $135/yr, and a significant portion of us make under that.
The point was that a 1% increase in inflation due to food and fuel wasnt the end of the world. Does a 1% cost of living increase hurt? Sure, for many people on the margin of making ends meet it can be bad. For most people, $1 more out of $100 is survivable.
Usually from what I have seen, most SWE's partners are also in tech or "white collar adjacent" making similar money. Which makes a household income of $270k, putting them in somewhere around the top ~7.5%.
I think you're misinterpreting that. Everything other than food and fuel went up 2.8%. Everything (including food and fuel) went up 3.8%. Therefore food and fuel went up more than 3.8%.
We can see that advertised on every corner, too. Gas costs for me locally went from $3 pre-war to over $5 now. My "investment" in EVs and solar is feeling really good right now.
The tidbid is that Maga voted for a lunatic who campaigned against "more wars", and then immediately started a war, wait it's not technically a war, it's a series of "special military operations" so he can bypass congress, in order to do insider trading, while workers and consumers get poorer.
Part of the reason people voted for "no more wars" was because of the long history of more wars from both parties. Desperate people make desperate choices.
Depends on what you call a “war” since the last time the US declared war was in WW II.. In terms of military operations, a partial list would probably include:
Seems balanced when you put them in a simple list like that, so it might not be obvious that the republican started wars cost many, many orders of magnitude more lives and treasure than the tiny actions attributed to dems.
If you're going to get technical, you need to pick apart the AUMF for Iraq.
In any case, I personally don't think the US interventions in Bosnia or Haiti rose to the level of the colloquial understanding of "no more wars." This is to the extent that the public of 2024 was even broadly aware of those interventions.
Major point is this: in the last 50 years, every GOP president has started a trillion-dollar boondoggle in the Middle East that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths or more (count is still running in Iran, which the President credibly threatens to nuke every other week). Democratic presidents have initiated e.g. peacekeeping missions or the like with definite endpoints and missions. "Both sides" elides all of this as if they are the remotely equivalent.
(I'm on record suggesting that the US military should be reduced to a footprint necessary to defend only the US states and not foreign interests. 75%+ cuts in budget as a start. 11 carrier battle groups to ~4, two per coast. etc.)
This point came up in a discussion of whether the Iran war is the first US war to be started and lost by the exact same team. Vietnam was floated, but they had a few shift changes before defeat was clear.
Yes, MAGA ran on a broad platform of chaos, griefing, and personal vendettas. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to connect the dots and know war was on the agenda.
aside from the first term? guy lost his marbles after 2020 but there were no new wars in the first term and that was evidence. turns out he has different handlers this time. and dementia. but there were 4 years with no new wars. I liked that.
There is a long history of evidence that voting for establishment candidates leads to more wars and Trump didn't start any new wars in his first term and reduced troop deployments in places where existing conflicts were active so I'm not sure what you mean by no evidence. Supporters were happy about that aspect of his first term.
But, like I said, desperate people make desperate choices. If you're a person who feels strongly about something the establishment wing of both parties agrees on, anti-establishment candidates look very appealing, warts and all.
Well, when the rich control both sides and both sides conspire to create drama to continue to control the country as they want....can't really do much. This country is done for.
The rich being in control of both sides does not make both sides equivalent when it comes to impacts on the commoner. The country is done for in large part because too many apathetic people are unable to discern very real differences in their political options, and instead of participating, you eject and poison the well on the way out which is exactly what the "rich" want you to do. You're not high-minded for your stance, you haven't figured out some secret, you're quite literally playing into their hand. Go vote in a Democratic primary and do something useful with yourself.
If you seriously think Biden was the same as Trump (or Harris would have been worse than Trump) you need a lobotomy (as at least a refresher high school civics course).
Seriously, it was (almost) all spelled out in Project 2025. That's what the country wanted and that's what we got/are getting. I hate it, but apparently 51% of voters disagree with me.
I voted for the only candidate (Chase Oliver) that appeared on my ballot that was basically 100% certain to not get us into wars, and I've had absolute vitriol spewed at me (including here on HN) because I was informed it was a default to Trump.
There's no way to act where you won't be hated by someone. Even if you stop paying taxes for the bombs someone will scream that you hate old people or the children.
Idealism is for the primaries. You knew with certainty that Chase Oliver wasn't going to win the presidency, which meant you were okay with either of the two candidates that definitely was going to win the presidency
wages have stagnated for decades now. N o o n e in the USA cares when it comes to keeping wages low at the benefit of the rich. And of course, N o o n e is defined by journalists, federal government, and billionaires.
The very first time I thought "That's it, Trump is done, it's over" is when he complained wages were too high in the US.
Clearly he thought it was a gaffe as he denied saying it shortly after saying it twice in two videotaped appearances. But he sailed on through that and many other misteps.
The US has literally never honored a deal with Iran. Iran has no reason to negotiate with the US. The US either has to back down, put boots on the ground, or sit and wait.
If the government survives, they had a quiet infrastructure investment from China they can activate to rebuild their damaged facilities.
Trump took a high risk gamble, that he would destabilize Iran and the people would overthrow the remnants. That didn't happen, and now Iran gets to inflict severe pain on the US.
I myself am delighted though, because everyone needs to get the fuck off oil, even if it's economically painful for a few years.
I understand it is a complicated calculation but to me personally, inflation feels much more than that. I have been tracking the price of milk. Around 3 months ago, i was getting a gallon of milk at $2.97, then it went up to 3.07, then 3.25. Yesterday I paid 3.40. That's like 15% gain on something as basic as milk. All numbers from the same store.
One thing I have noted during this inflationary period is that individual stores/chains are gaming pricing much more than I remember before.
For example, your store might be competing for business using the headline price of eggs and making it up on milk and bread. In our city, Whole Foods was the cheapest non-warehouse place to buy eggs for a while. Anecdotally, it looks like one could save a relatively large % on various goods simply by going to a different store, which was not the case a few short years ago.
Relative pricing stability appears to have collapsed, shopping is more intellectually-intensive now.
You are right and we did shop around for a while to optimize for the best value for the price we were paying. We ended up on a store (Aldi, in this case) which overall had the cheapest basic groceries.
Because real inflation that people feel is always much worse than the actual number. No one cares if the TVs got cheaper but everyone cares if milk and eggs are more expensive. The average number will still tell you inflation isn’t that bad. Plus variations in local pricing can affect people much more. Dense cities will see a much higher inflation rate than rural areas.
They apply random multipliers to many products to account for "quality" and "performance", it completely skew the numbers and doesn't reflect the life of most people.
They even give you an example showing how the same car but with 3 more speeds, "smartphone integration" and "keyless entry" should be 3.6% inflation but actually counts as 0.6%
Inflation itself is not a good metric as soon as you leave the avg.
You are on HN, the chance you are part of the american average is very low.
That 15% cost is not relevant if you don't drink milk. Its also a lot less if you are able to save money. That money saved might be for something very specific like one specific car or a house.
The house market, as far as i understand it, is more decoupled from inflation than not. Here in germany a farm costs still 600k and goes up and down based on location and other factors. My money in the bank doesn't has to be inflation neutral, it should be house market neutral for the money i only want to buy a house for.
You can also choose and change your buying power. Instead of the sports car x, you can buy y. Instead of buying the city center house, you can buy the farm outside.
This is not US politics. Its global politics and it affects me as well. Independent of this, hn is not a platform the avg person is visiting. It requires a certain amount of high tech expertise to understand the conent of hn which statistically pushes the avg hn reader above the avg person.
You do know how much impact the USA has around the globe right? right?!
hey just because I am not making above median/average income doesn't mean I don't have the tech expertise. And HN is not that tech intensive. A movie recommendation for you - Good will hunting.
A better source is the USDA AMS which surveys the prices of several different milk products in retail outlets in many cities. They do this not only for milk but many common foods. The data goes back decades.
milk prices go up and down even outside inflation cycles. how do you know this is inflation. price of milk at your local grocery store in last 3 months is not enough data to attribute causation.
you’re not totally wrong but it’s not the outright lie you seem to imply. things like tweaks to the “standard basket” that they claim are in line with consumer preferences, which themselves changed because of inflation, for example, are one way we get a sort of hidden shrink flation.
But it is a lie, all the basics are skyrocketing and all the useless tech gadgets are getting cheaper (or better, which counts as deflation for them). If food is 30% more expensive but cars/TVs are 0% more expensive but 10 times "better" you get an overall "3% inflation"
I disagree and think GP poster is right on the money.
There are many ways in which inflation numbers are cooked; just one of them is the hedonic adjustment [1].
Others include an un-representative basket of goods.
The basket of goods is adjusted every 2 years, but not necessarily in a way that mirrors the way real households adapt their spending patterns to increased prices.
Owner equivalent rent (LOL) massively lags behind home prices.
Honestly, when 10s or hundreds of millions of people's perception does not match *Official Government Numbers*, then it's reason to suspect that the official numbers are a poor metric.
What I don’t understand is how the stock market can be so decoupled from reality. It’s a game at this point and completely disconnected from reality. Everything should be down 20%+ given oil is an input to everything and yet stocks are ATHing.
Stocks (naturally) price in inflation before inflation becomes headlines everywhere. People uncertain about the dollar trying to shelter their wealth from inflation will move to stocks to shield themselves.
idk, I read an analysis recently that retail investors in funds like the S&P500 are breaking how the stock market is "supposed" to work since people keep pumping the same money every month for retirement into the same 500 companies (or whatever an index is funding) without consequence to their actions, so they're never punished. Line goes up. The purchasing power of the masses outweighs the old brokerage class that decided which companies succeeded based on "real merits".
I've always rolled my eyes at inflation because clearly, it's worse than the basket of goods they use to monitor. Groceries probably get incentives to keep bread, eggs, etc. prices somewhat regulated so the inflation number is muted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
A completely unnecessary war that benefits no one other than Israel and harms the rest of the world. The only positive to come from this is the annihilation of US military assets in the Middle East and an even deeper unity of the world against Zionism. It’s tough times but we will ultimately defeat this heinous ideology.
isn't correct. There are plenty of people on HN working in military contract industries, high tech arms manufacturing and such. They lobby Gov and benefit financially as do their employees.
Only certain types of contractors, and likely only in the short term.
Military contractors do well when the military has widespread support from the voters. Congresscritters will happily approve tax dollars going to the military industrial complex when their constituents view the US as the global protector of democracy. Wars like this one that aren't popular and make us look like thugs open the floor up to anti-military candidates. So yeah, the companies building missiles do well while the war is on, but the people like me who automate military fuel farms see budget cuts and projects cancelled.
I wonder if it does benefit arms R&D folks. At least, as someone not too well informed on the military stuff, it looks like the moral of the story has been that our high-end stuff hasn’t functioned as well as the price tag lead us to expect, and a bunch of cheap drones might be the way to go.
If I worked in military R&D I’d be worried that focus might shift away from the more speculative/less delivery-oriented/fun to work on products…
There was a time when USA guaranteed the safe passage of shipping, which helped secure a peaceful world order, apparently. I view this as a continuation of that legacy, but admit I only have 1-2 books supporting this view.
Everything I said was true : Bretton woods exists, and my opinion flows from that. Feel free to disregard it or correct the facts, I think that'd be a good discussion.
And yeah, USA might do dumb things that put them into a bind, but ultimately the peaceful flow of traffic through Hormuz is a goal worth pursuing for the world economic health.
This is some extraordinary up-is-down construction. Hormuz was open in February, and for decades preceding that. It's closed now. How is this situation the result of the "guarantee of safe passage of shipping", exactly?
I've seen reporting that energy prices won't return to pre-war levels this calendar year, even assuming an immediate return to the status quo basically right now (which seems unlikely).
I find the whole thing really confusing. The facts I can see with my own eyes suggest high inflation and this surely means no substantial rate cuts (which... the market has expected) if not reduced consumer spending and risk of recessions.
But the markets think everything is... fine? So... what are we missing here?
We probably aren't missing anything. It just can't happen right now because if the stock market capitulates then it does so for years and everyone loses a bunch of money. Their only option is to hope for some kind of end or bailout or whatever that keeps getting further away, and they've pushed that hope way past reason.
> But the markets think everything is... fine? So... what are we missing here?
The current rally is extremely narrow, mostly just AI/Big Tech and chip stocks. But yeah, the "market" appears to believe that this will all be over soon, which seems unlikely to me.
if everyone believes the straight of hormuz is open, even if it is not, even if 20% less oil is being moved globally, what happens to oil prices? what happens to oil deliveries?
is it possible for oil to be cheap in America while Bangladesh experiences shortages, instead of everyone paying more?
is oil the same as energy? or is it more relevant to transportation?
does it matter? suburban life is quite comfortable, a LOT of people keep choosing big single family home with yard, drive everywhere. driving everywhere is VERY comfortable. a lot of people like it. are they willing to pay more for it? does buying a house that is MUCH cheaper by virtue of being far away from a city stop making sense for 250m americans just because gas is 50% more expensive?
I assume this is a rhetorical question. The Strait is a global shipping channel; a lot of basic commodities flow through it. Not just oil. Fertilizer, grain, basic chemicals are dependent on the channel being open. Today, the WFP was stating that food aid to Somalia has been delayed by 1+ month because of the war.
i don't own a car, i bike everywhere with young kids. i like public transport. we're not talking about that. people fucking LOVE cars. they LOVE single family homes. everywhere, in every community.
Energy pricing is quite easy: We have a global market, the rich people win.
The USA is responsible for this horrendes situation, the USA people will not be the people struggling and dying.
Its the poor people in every country around the globe which literaly will die, while the rich countries will just continue doing whatever they were doing.
Holidays, traveling to visit famiily and friends. It will cost more for sure but you will still do it.
The poor can't afford the food anymore because cooking becomes more expensive. going to your daily job becomes more expensive. The likelyhood of people is getting destroyed beecause the small jobs, the niche jobs are suddenly uprooted. Like the small tuktuk or the cheap and dangerous bus for 6 people is too expensive suddenly.
I have read so many arguments on this site that soft power in fact, apparently does not exist. So, you can't lose what didn't exist in the first place. So I guess a special military operation or two is no problem, according to them.
The average family spends something like $5,000 on gas a year, maybe $10k. Gas could double and it’d be felt, but it’s still just a portion of total spend.
We’ve had $4 gas before (20 years ago?!) and it was annoying but it didn’t end the world.
The perspective from over here in HN land is very skewed.
According to the US Census, median household income in 2024 was $80,000. Add federal and state income tax* of 30%, and you're left with $56,000. Rent in lower-cost areas is around $12,000 ($1k/mo.) and health insurance (assuming ACA, not fancy private plans) is another $7000. Utility prices vary wildly but average something like $450-500 (so $6000 per year). if you don't live in a particularly high-cost area and skip luxuries like home Internet service or media subscriptions.
That's just over $30,000 left over per year for all household expenses, including "luxuries" like food, clothes, and car and home maintenance. Heaven forbid you have loans (car, student, etc.) or any revolving credit debt.
The difference between $5k and $10k in fuel costs is therefore easily 15% vs. 35% of total "inessential" spending. With food and other goods consistently been driven up by inflation and tariffs, there's just no margin for an "average" family.
(Sources vary for the above; US Census comes data from its own website, rent from TIME, health costs from Forbes, and utilities from move.org. Feel free to find better reference numbers if you doubt the above.)
*- yes, not all states charge income tax; most of the ones that don't have other taxes (sales, gas, property) to make up the gap
> is it possible for oil to be cheap in America while Bangladesh experiences shortages, instead of everyone paying more?
I think the US has been ramping up domestic oil production for a while, creating an interesting situation where (global) prices are high but (domestic) supply is healthy. Prices are up at the pump in the US, but I'm not sure how much of that OPEC+ price-fixing or "risk premium".
In 2015, the US lifted its ban on exporting domestic oil. Since then, US domestic pricing has been linked to the global price.
This means that "domestic production" does not mean what you imply (which is "domestic production that must be sold in the US.") If US producers can make more money selling 100% of domestic production overseas, they will do that.
This is not price-fixing, it is the predictable outcome of a market design where US drivers bid against Asian airlines for petroleum products.
Oil is fungible. Oil producers are going to sell it to whoever pays the most. There is no law that says US oil producers have to sell it to US customers. Having domestic supply does nothing to insulate US consumers from higher prices.
Many products are shipped half way across the US on semi trucks, that hits everyone’s pockets even if you drive an EV.
Train’s move around vast amounts of freight but they got optimized for coat per ton for coal, wheat, etc not latency. Which then plays havoc if you try and do just in time manufacturing etc using them. Airfare and thus airfreight is simply dominated by fuel costs which hits many industries in ways that are less obvious but still expensive.
I live in a major shipping center in a state with a lot of agriculture.
I think that's why my grocery prices haven't gone nuts. For instance, I buy whole chickens (local-grown, free-range) for 99c/lb regularly.
Looking at my receipts, I spend a few hundred/week at this $KROGER. And that includes buying alcohol and non-food items like charcoal, cat litter, diapers, cleaning supplies.
I buy groceries 5-7 times a week. I buy things pretty by-need, for the next thing I'm cooking.
I can walk to my local $KROGER or drive 1min (which I do when I'm buying more than I want to carry.)
I assume they get to the store the same way they get to the stores in the cities. On trucks. A lot of what I buy (meat and produce) is grown in the state I live in. So I can make a 6-serving chicken and orzo dish for under $15 easily, for instance. I got it down to $10 when the meat is BOGO too.
Well unlike when he and Jerome Powell unleashed the money printer on us in 2020 and it took most of Biden's term to tame inflation, this should last as long as the Iran war. Unless there's a permanent shift in the strait or sticky consumer prices overcome the efficient market.
It's possible, in the short term, but eventually the only oil flowing thru the Strait of Hormuz will be Iranian oil, and perhaps not even that. Give countries enough time and they'll rather invest in building a way around Iran than giving them money for passage thru international waters.
I am a climate activist and I don't want this, because temporarily reduced supply and spiking prices do not do any long-term damage to the oil companies, if anything they just make more money. What I would like to see is a steep drop in demand resulting in lower prices because nobody needs to buy oil and gas anymore.
'climate activists' wanted a revenue neutral carbon tax that would simultaneously lower everyone's income taxes. Thus giving people the ability to 'lower their taxes' with greener choices while the energy intensive activities of the rich were harder to dodge (hard to power their private jets with electrons)
You're wasting your breath. It took me a long time to realize that folks on the other side of the isle had fully bought into the 'maximal short term interest' ideology of the business community. I no longer have very much to say to them at all.
I just think it's amusing that this is presented as a very bad thing in the context of Trump, but it's what climate activists have been seeking (only more so). When climate activists pursue this goal, it's presented as a laudable self sacrifice we must accept.
Because there is a gigantic difference between "I will now change the lives of everyone on the planet just because and in a very short period of time without thinking about any long term goals or consequences" vs. "we want the planet to be habital for our children and for everyone affected by this, lets start pushing for investing into renewable energy instead of just burning fossil fuels".
Even tarifs in general are not necessarily a bad idea, its a horrendes bad idea if you wiggle your thumb around, guess numbers from 0-100 and higher, let that be printed on a piece of cardboard and present it to the world as the current leader of the biggest co2 producer and military power on the whole planet affecting suddenly everyone.
Climate activists, as a whole, have not been able to materially affect costs positively or negatively, in any sector other than maybe TED talks and documentaries.
Yeah, funny, all the people that turned away from EVs because the subsidies were going away suddenly realize that EVs and renewables are a much more resilient combo than being reliant on fossil fuels and their refining network.
I can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war. We have
* Demonstrated that the US simply can't offer any meaningful security guarantee to it's middle east partners.
* Permanently ceded de facto control over the straits of Hormuz to Iran
* Significantly strengthened the hardliners in the Iranian regime and cleared the way for them to have absolute power by eliminating all moderates
* Spiked inflation at home and doubled down on pissing off pretty much every single country except Russia by heaping sky rocketing energy costs on them
* Exposed the perilous state of of the defense industrial base (in spite of us spending more than the next 10 countries combined). We simply can't produce enough military hardware to sustain a sustained conflict with a country like Iran. I shudder to think just how badly we will be outmatched in a shooting war with China.
All of this to get to a point where we are negotiating a deal which is worse than what we already had with the JCPOA.
I think we will look back on this as the US version of the Suez crisis, the beginning of the end of the US empire.
The US oil industry is making massive amount of money directly from the people of the US on the inflated prices, since their domestic supply and refineries are unaffected. It also perfectly matches the actions a foreign country trying to harm the US would take. There's so many terrible options to choose from!
The west coast doesn’t actually have pipelines to receive oil from the mountain/Midwest regions, and Alaska has been declining for a while now. So California mostly gets oil from Brazil (not affected) and Iraq (affected).
There are much easier ways of increasing the oil prices that don't have as much drawbacks as trump's war. Of course, for _some_ reason most people and countries prefer _lowering_ oil prices.
> since their [...] refineries are unaffected
Unfortunately not the case. There are an odd number of refinery issues happening across the US lately.
The saving grace is that China (well modern living CCP members) have never had an armed conflict. China's military ranks are people who got there by playing politics and bending exercises to their benefit rather than showing battlefield competence. There are no war vets or experienced players.
So while they might have incredible man power and manufacturing capability, everyone in that first battle will be seeing battle for the first time in their life.
How is that "saving grace" in any way
China is even worse than Russia on that matter. Before the invasion to Ukraine, Russia was heavily involved in Syria, Chechnia and other conflicts and with that experience it failed miserably. China, with all its posturing, military wise is even worse than Russia. That's why all it can do is propaganda war on social media to weaken American society.
I dont think starting war that you then proceed to loose somehow makes Russia and America look strong.
This difference makes China look smarter and wiser.
The flip side is that the US isn't used to fighting anything other than asymmetric warfare / insurgencies / terrorism against people who can't project force and can't really hit back. We park valuable assets out in the open on military bases and installations around the world, and don't do anything to shelter them or even move them around during a conflict because of hubris.
Iran also basically just fought us to a stalemate, with an arguably long-term strategic victory going to Iran, just by being willing to absorb more punishment in the short term. Once we depleted our stocks of expensive weaponry we had to stop. We could win every fight and still lose the war.
> Iran also basically just fought us to a stalemate, with an arguably long-term strategic victory going to Iran, just by being willing to absorb more punishment in the short term. Once we depleted our stocks of expensive weaponry we had to stop. We could win every fight and still lose the war.
Iran had a different victory condition. All they had to do was outlast and not be completely wiped out. Trump's victory condition was... well, only Trump knows. Short of a total ground invasion of Iran and full eradication of the Iranian regime (a tall, tall order), victory for the US in Iran, in the eyes of the public, was always going to be impossible.
This is a war that even the deep state US military-intelligence complex had been resisting starting for decades. That really demonstrates what a colossally bad idea it was.
Trump seemed to think that the Iranian regime was unstable and would fall once the US killed their top ranks and applied a bit of pressure. Turns out that he was very wrong (and experts would have told him if he had bothered to ask / listen).
IMO the last point is a definitely plus. Defense procurement is a feeding trough for the incumbents. Exposing the current state is a required first step for any meaningful transition (not sufficient and will probably not happen this time, but required nevertheless). My 2c.
Short, medium and long-term this will spur the world to move off of fossil fuels. I'm not a fan of war, especially this stupid one, but that one benefit may be, unintentionally, worth it.
Ah, 'demand destruction', which in sounds positive in theory but in practice will likely mean poverty, famine and 'population reduction'.
In the short term, Trump is actually paying people to stop existing solar and wind projects and is not exactly open to new ones starting up. So.. oil it is then.
It's nice to be optimistic, but we already have incentives to upgrade to renewable energy.
If you look at it from a world rather than USA perspective, expensive oil is encouraging other countries to buy new energy tech and EVs from China. It was probably going to happen anyways, but Trump sped it up.
I'm sure you've at least heard what the United States' leaders have to say. To paraphrase Trump, "stopping nuclear proliferation to a group of lunatics that support terrorism". And also (still paraphrasing Trump), "the US doesn't need this as much as the rest of the world." So, perhaps this doesn't put the US ahead relative to other countries, but it puts them ahead of the counterfactual nuclear wasteland they could become.
Whether or not you believe the United States' leaders, whether or not you think there was a better way for them to achieve their goals (something something Obama deal) is up for debate. But it's very facetious to say you "can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war," when the United States' leaders have been publicly announcing it for nearly a year.
It's actually very difficult to implement a change in our timeline on such a complex issue without causing a mix of positive and negative effects relative to your desired goal. It's very hard to impute whether anyone in the White House actually had a successful causal motive->plan->implementation->effect loop deliberately, but there are always high points, even of grotesque failure.
Obviously it's not NET positive, but if I had to highlight one positive for the US from their perspective, setting most of our guided munitions on fire overnight breaks the military, and the suspicion is that it breaks the military at a time when China is not quite yet prepared to invade Taiwan. It is now in a widely acknowledged catastrophic munitions stockpile crisis which Congress will have to fix via large, sustained investment; Increasing procurement rates for many systems by an order of magnitude on the low end. A year ago, and 10 years ago, and 25 years ago, it was in a severe munitions stockpile crisis according to everyone who's ever ran a wargame or tried to figure out deterrence policy for a non-nuclear shooting war
After the Cold War, we basically reduced most munitions stockpiles to a level consistent with a Desert Storm scale operation, but kept paying exorbitant amounts of money to keep defense contractors technically alive, producing a handful of units a year at costs that pay for the overhead of existing. In areas like naval procurement, the contradictions entailed by this approach combined with neoliberal austerity posturing and a lackadaisical response to delays, have combined to turn almost every major shipbuilding effort since the Cold War into an expensive failure. We are spending a remarkable amount of money on military equipment and probably getting 5% of what we would get if we spent twice that much and emphasized industrial performance rather than contractor sustainment.
A year ago, Congress and the Pentagon were carefully ignoring this for political reasons, while the MIC & foreign policy blob believes China was looking at it as an opportunity.
> It is now in a widely acknowledged catastrophic munitions stockpile crisis which Congress will have to fix via large, sustained investment;
How exactly is it positive to waste munition and thus force the congress to buy new munition? You will spend a huge amount of money to ... get where you was.
Printing munitions is not as long as scaling up production to print up munitions. Russian war showed that it will be too late to scale anything once the enemy trench in.
I think the idea is that now that it's a public issue, it will have to be addressed more than just bringing us back to pre-war levels.
Your top point is honestly the biggest.
Until this year, US military bases were seen as an asset. They were thought to deter attacks, and in the case of someone being crazy enough to attack the country that hosted a US military base, they sold the promise of a quick and decisive response.
But for countries in the Middle East, every base was nothing but a liability with nothing but a long list of detriments. The bases got attacked and destroyed with basically zero effort whatsoever, local militaries had to step up to defend the US bases on their own dime and with their own people putting their lives on the line, and the bases basically just served as provocation and ended up with the countries being attacked as "punishment" for letting the US military operate on their land. And the US put in the bare minimum effort, if any, to defend the countries being attacked. It was basically "that's on you. Buzz off".
Europe is now being threatened with having their US bases cut back/removed entirely and I'm not sure if people are even worried anymore. People have been using the term "paper tiger" to refer to Russia these past 4 years because their efforts at war have been absolutely embarrassing. Somehow the US has made Russia look competent, and despite being against all the BS America did in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, I didn't think America would somehow show itself to be more rotted out from the inside than Russia. I always assumed the US was competent, albeit war hungry. But somehow competence has completely vanished.
And right now, East Asian allies of the US operate under the very wrong assumption that the US will back them up if China/Russia/North Korea tries something. And now that those countries know the US won't do shit, there's a non zero chance that they've taken war plans from purely hypothetical plans to "we could actually do this" plans.
The situation in Europe is even more crazy. The US needs the bases in Europe to project power in the Middle East. If every country in Europe would ask the US to leave then the US would have a very serious issue projecting power around the world.
The US bases are also pretty expensive to set up. Lots of logistic support has to be in place to let those bases function. That require a lot of support from the host country. Normally, you would expect the US to be friendly with the host countries, but that seems lost on the current administration.
What is really wrong is that it is known that russia is fighting in Ukraine with drones designed in Iran. And we have seen how hard it is for US designed weapons to deal with those drones. To the point that a lot of development is happening in Ukraine to deal with this problem.
By attacking Iran, the US has shown the world that Ukraine is the weapon supplier of choice against future drone wars.
Yeah, the US is trying to peddle massive missiles that individually cost as much as the entire defense budget for some small nations, as well as large boats that are just giant sitting ducks. Ukraine is showing that cheap drones are the best defensive asset to have and are currently difficult to counter. China is always flaunting their drone shows, and there's no doubt they've got a defensive/offensive fleet of them ready to go and the US seems to be making zero efforts at making any sort of defense against them. There's been plenty of time to learn from Ukraine and the US military industrial complex is just twiddling their thumbs and sucking up money for more of last century's tech
> The bases got attacked and destroyed with basically zero effort whatsoever, local militaries had to step up to defend the US bases on their own dime and with their own people putting their lives on the line
As a US citizen, I hope more countries come to this realization and start rejecting these.
It's such a lose-lose for everyone
The establishment and maintenance of these bases cost the tax payers so much....
If only we could refocus this massive expenditure of resources to internal domestic infrastructure...
The America First MAGA people fail so hard to understand that these expenditures on things like foreign bases and US Aid resulted in far greater returns for us. It's never been about altruism or the greater good.
I say this as an anti-empirical leftist with no great sympathy for the effort, but for those proclaiming to put America's interests above all else it's just such an obvious and idiotic short-sighted self-own.
US Aid has probably been the biggest ace the US ever had in its hand.
US farmers growing otherwise unprofitable crops with no buyer? Check. US exporters being able to export crops? Check. US Aid workers being able to give food to starving people in countries that have huge deposits of rare earth materials? Check. US intelligence apparatus having advanced knowledge of developing situations in strategically important countries? Check. US Aid workers being able deliver tremendous goodwill to countries that China or Russia would love to have their tentacles in? Check.
Everyone's happy, everyone makes money, everyone eats.
Yet Donald Trump and Elon Musk don't like it, so away it goes. And there's no adult in the room to say "no, you're not cutting it, here's why".
Musk claimed that USAID was a CIA front as part of his rationale to gut it. A very strange thing for a defense contractor to say out loud.
>The establishment and maintenance of these bases cost the tax payers so much....
They supported USA's hegemony, extension of soft powers - essentially (not a quote) 'we trade with USA because they're our partner, they help us with defence against tyrants'. Except, when USA vote in a fascist tyrant.
Many bridges have been burned.
USA is just like a company taken over by venture capitalists, and just like such a company those capitalists look like they'll run it into the ground and make off with all the money.
I'm not sure if people are even worried anymore.
European here (from Spain), and the overwhelming majority of people I know are hoping for the removal of the bases. They are worried, yes... worried that it's just grandstanding and it's not really going to get done (which is likely, because those bases have always been there mainly for the benefit of the US).
Which US bases were destroyed?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/05/06/ira...
https://archive.is/fR8Do
Taking damage does not mean destroyed.
Ahh, so you mean the bases are fully functional and all personnel are back there?
No one said that.
> But somehow competence has completely vanished.
It was pushed out, by force.
It was voted out, by the electorate.
It was replaced, by the tech bros.
It's not over yet, but the status quo is certainly a loss for the US. Which to me indicates Trump won't stop here, he needs something he can at least spin as a win.
I think Trump is about to lose patience with Iran again and we're in for a second phase of this war. What that looks like afterwards is anyone's guess. I'm not very optimistic.
It's not impossible that if the IRGC can't make payroll that things start to change from the inside, like what happened in Serbia. I'm not going to bet on that outcome though.
I might agree but would wait until the highly enriched uranium situation is resolved, because if Iran gets to keep their approx 1000lbs all they have to do is make a simple gun-type device and sail it into New York City. It's pretty easy. If the HEU is extracted from Iran it makes everything worth the pain, and also fyi Trump ran on the issue so it should be no surprise to anybody. I also note that people complaining about depleting US munitition stockpiles are nowhere to be found when the issue of Ukraine is brought up, and all the material we give (and will give) to them.
So a win will be returning to Obama’s Iran deal?
And the reason no one brings up Ukraine is because we used more interceptors in three days than were sent to Ukraine in the entire 4+ years of war. It’s a complaint that doesn’t make sense unless one is jd Vance.
The difference is obvious.
Why would you think returning to Obama's Iran deal would be a win? Actually, let me word this better: how could you possibly think that anyone in the White House for the past decade would think returning to Obama's Iran deal is better than this war?
The reason it's so incredible you could think such a thing is the White House has been saying how horrible that deal was in every interview for months, and of course intermittently for a decade.
> all they have to do is
US IC assessment is Iran is 5-10y away from delivery tech, and there's no imminent threat.
What do you mean delivery tech? Your delivery tech is a cargo ship. We're not talking about an ICBM that requires sophisticated re-entry materials. We are talking about a crude gun-device like Hiroshima, which is actually pretty easy if you google it.
And yet again, even in these hypotheticals, New Yorkers suffer for decisions they didn't make and don't want. Why don't they sail it into Florida?
Capital flight away from government debt offerings could also be happening:
https://www.ft.com/content/2e0185d1-3229-463c-8391-6dd09fe11...
Then the causal chain is War in Iran -> Oil Price increase -> Inflation & Fed Rate fears -> Treasury sell-off. Geopolitical risk creates inflation shock, and if bonds sell off on war news, their utility as a portfolio hedge weakens, and capital holders start looking for new assets (stocks and property). Also, the exodus from bonds first results in a pile of sidelined capital whose eventual rotation into stocks and property and gold leads to more market instability down the road.
Also, Russian and Iranian windfall oil profits are up along with those of Exxon, Chevron, Shell etc., the arms producers like Lockheed are booming, and for some reason, ‘prediction markets’ (gambling interests) also:
https://vestedfinance.com/blog/us-stocks/who-made-money-from...
i dont understand why the hardliners are bad they were right. the war waged against them was threatened to be nuclear "an entire civilization will die tonight". the country threatening iran unjustly is indeed the great satan. no justification except for being egged on by our hyper aggressive expansionist apartheid proxy israel. we should pay reparations.
When the war is fought over literal nuclear weapons, you should not be so tongue-in-cheek about calling a war nuclear.
>I shudder to think just how badly we will be outmatched in a shooting war with China.
A study a few years ago gave the US just 1 week before all its missiles were depleted with China in just a naval war.
> I can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war.
I wouldn't jump to conclusions yet. The war is not over. I wouldn't even be so sure as to say Iran is in a good place right now.
Iran can absorb more pain than the US, but even that has a deadline. For the US, the only pain is inflation, which is more a matter of political capital than anything tangible. Trump is a lame duck president so I think he's more than happy to spend his political capital on this.
It's different for Iran. The main concern with a prolonged conflict is a lack of oil storage space. Once the tanks are full you have to cap the wells which is nigh disastrous for Iran because of the cost and difficulty of reactivating those wells later on.
To be clear, I'm not saying the US is going to come out victorious. But war is complex and it's a folly to predict any outcomes this early on.
> Iran can absorb more pain than the US, but even that has a deadline.
It doesn't. This is the western mentality, thinking you are dealing with sane people.
I'm from Iran (now living in the West), there's a famous Shia motto: "Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala".
Around 30% of the population are die hard IRGC supporters, another 10% are neutral and the rest don't like the regime.
The problem is that, the war has caused a major rally around the flag effect.
The IRGC has more support than ever now. It's a battle for the Iran now against United States, attempting to destroy people's homes.
I'm not a fan of IRGC. My 20 year old cousin was captured and tortured in Evin prison for 6 months during the Mahsa uprising in 2022 [3]. You can't imagine how much I hate them, but I love Iran more. If I was there, I would be fighting the Americans right now.
Iranians are not going give up, right now, you will have to kill all 90M of us to "win".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashura
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karbala
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahsa_Amini_protests
> It doesn't. This is the western mentality, thinking you are dealing with sane people.
I'm not talking about sanity. I understand that the IRGC is greater than the sum of the parts and that no individual life matters.
I'm talking about the oil wells. The IRGC may not care about human life, but you need money to stay in power. Money that will disappear the longer you can't sell your oil and the more oils you have to cap.
> The problem is that, the war has caused a major rally around the flag effect.
I don't believe you. Do you have proof? Iran is pretty damn closed off from the rest of the world so I have a hard time believing that you have some great insider knowledge about this.
> I'm not a fan of IRGC. My 20 year old cousin was captured and tortured in Evin prison for 6 months during the Mahsa uprising in 2022 [3]. You can't imagine how much I hate them, but I love Iran more. If I was there, I would be fighting the Americans right now.
I don't believe you. I'd believe you saying that you'd be against America, but not that you'd be fighting them. If that were true, why are you not traveling to Iran to join the IRGC right now?
> there's a famous Shia motto: "Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala".
The shared cultural context is so low that as an American, I have absolutely no idea what this means. If I had to guess, "zealotry" or "patriotism"?
“ For the US, the only pain is inflation”
That is not correct and the comment you replied to even pointed out several ways it hurt the US other than that
Inflation is the only Immediate pain. The other harms will play out over years.
While war games already predicted we’d run out of basically all defensive and offensive weapons almost immediately in a confrontation with China, that wasn’t demonstrated yet. Now it has been proven, but not even with China, with much smaller and less powerful Iran. We used a major portion of our stuff, it didn’t accomplish anything major, and now we’re already depleted like a paper tiger.
> While war games already predicted we’d run out of basically all defensive and offensive weapons almost immediately in a confrontation with China, that wasn’t demonstrated yet. Now it has been proven, but not even with China, with much smaller and less powerful Iran. We used a major portion of our stuff, it didn’t accomplish anything major, and now we’re already depleted like a paper tiger.
This is a positive, not a negative. It's a needed wake up call and better to get it now instead of during a war with China.
Besides inflation, American has other problems like running out of missiles and bombs. This war is about attrition, and American weapons are being attrited faster than Iranian ones.
The war is not over, but I would not count out the Iranians going for another strategic goal not mentioned in the GP post: make is so that the American president that attacked Iran loses the midterm big time.
It doesn't matter who "wins" the war, it's already a strategic loss for the US, like every single conflict the US went into since ww2. If they can't just blow the problem away with bombs they invariably and inevitably fuck it up, and as it turns out you can't bomb away that many problems
> like every single conflict the US went into since ww2
Depends on how you connect conflicts to strategic aims. The US won the cold war. Could they have done so without all the military conflicts? Further, what's the best way to maintain a strong fighting force? By fighting. The US needs wars to maintain it's fighting muscle.
> The US won the cold war.
They won it so hard they're not even aware it's still going on...
If you're referring to China, that's a new cold war.
Russia can't even beat it's much smaller, much poorer neighbor in a full on war.
And if Iran drops or threatens just a single nuke, I doubt there will be left any arguments.
They don't have nukes or would've already done that.
No, they wouldn't, and they don't have it because they have chosen not to. There is something called an escalation ladder: you do not threaten to leave or kill your partner just because she spilled milk on your floor. That is the same reason Russia did not use nukes, and why other nuclear armed countries involved in conflicts have also avoided using them. The same logic applies here. Another example is that the US could bomb the Kharg island containing Iran's oil infrastructure, but that would be a major escalation. Iran would then have no reason to show restraint and could bomb the oil infrastructure of the Gulf states, creating a worldwide crisis.
> For the US, the only pain is inflation
That and its trust and geopolitical influence even among allies being quickly eroded to the benefit of countries like China.
Inflation and ammo stockpiles are easier to fix.
> That and its trust and geopolitical influence even among allies
Yeah but all of that is orthogonal to the war itself. It's not like Trump needed to threaten to invade Greenland to go to war with Iran.
I find it so interesting that you believe the Supreme Leader was a moderate. Also that somehow, the almost complete dismantling of the Iranian military resulted in Iran having more control over the straits of Hormuz. "The end of the US empire" so dramatic! fun stuff
Easy. There has been no "almost complete dismantling of the Iranian military" and anyone saying so is lying or deeply propagandized.
The US was not supposed to come out ahead. This is crony capitalism. Think about all the money Trump JR can make selling drones and all the VC companies benefiting from defense spending!
And all of the options / predictions market money being made by insiders who know the next episode in the soap opera before it happens.
> middle east partners
Well, European partners are looking, too - and they are drawing logical conclusions, such as producing more interceptors locally rather than wait years for the first batches of PAC-3.
Google searches for the epstein files went down significantly.
Probably going to juice EV sales is the only positive I'm taking away from this. Trump might end up being the person who tipped the balance and kills the ICE car.
(Once ICE cars fall below a certain percentage, they will have structural disadvantages to EVs because ICE engines are so expensive to design.)
When the position of the United States gets hurt, it means "liberals" get hurt - where "liberal" means anybody who might believe in lofty ideals like Constitutional rights or simply hasn't thrown in their lot with a hollow New York con man. I have tried and tried to steelman, but from everything I can tell this is really the only concrete policy mandate behind Trumpism. It's a death cult. Heaven's Gate didn't think they were killing themselves either.
>I can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war.
The stock market did, which is amazing if you're the top 10% of asset owners who own 50% of the country's wealth.
>except Russia by heaping sky rocketing energy costs on them
Russia doesn't benefit from this energy spike, since its biggest customers, China and India, have long term contracts that Russia can't just rip and renegotiate to charge spot prices, since they're in a pickle right now and depend on imports to keep the war going while not being able to sell to too many nations so they're stuck watching potential earnings go past them.
> Russia doesn't benefit from this energy spike,
No? https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/11/iran-war-russia-putin-t...
At this point I doubt anything could make stock market go down... It seems that there is no connection to anything but itself.
I feel the same.
Why does the market seem so disconnected from the general economy?
Did the stock market come out ahead? The Dow is about where it was when this started.
The Dow is not the stock market. Look at the total stock market (something like VTI).
That said, it seems that the stock market is doing well in spite of this war, and not because of it. Who knows how long that will last
They probably had a few stock owners in mind, which came ahead and keep coming ahead with strategically planned transactions placed right before another US major move - all by pure coincidence of course.
The United States is simply an imaginary entity. Some people have been winning for quite a while.
The tidbid they're not talking about are the fact that wages are down .5%
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/12/cpi-inflation-april-2026-.ht...
Those are real wages. We would expect to see that during a sudden jump in inflation. Wages tend to lag inflation.
The other interesting part in that article is that excluding fuel and food still shows 2.8% inflation - only 1% attributable to food and fuel. Makes it seem like the main article and this article have different spins.
Edit: Wow people are jumping on this. The point is that food and fuel increases account for about 26% of the overall inflation number, meaning that the bulk of inflation is not related directly to fuel. The original article makes it it seem different.
I will say, this past inflation spike has completely broken the assumptions I had from 1970s economics that employers would raise their 'cost of living' raises to keep pace with inflation. My employer seems to think 2.5% is fine, as they've done it multiple years in recent past with only one extraordinary year netting 4%. I am now very skeptical of any so called 'wage price spiral'
That's why macro economic data is based on nationally reported data from tens of thousands employers rather than just one company.
We can look at the data and clearly see the inflection point where wages started rising faster once the pandemic began.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECIWAG
And looking at real wages, we can see that wages have actually outpaced inflation since ~2015
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
> I am now very skeptical of any so called 'wage price spiral'
The wage-price spiral now happens when people move. I've definitely noticed that average salaries for my role (data person) have increased singificantly since 2020 or so.
Employers pay you the least amount of money it takes to keep you from working somewhere else. It's always been true and it probably always will be.
Employers will increase your wages just enough to keep you from leaving.
With structural disincentives to leaving (medical coverage in the US), that is almost always a less-than-inflation amount.
Do employers even call it a COL increase any more? My employer "rebranded" the annual raises as "merit increases" many years ago.
Nobody gives you cost of living increases. That's not how a market works. You get cost of LABOR increases. These are related but only indirectly.
> only 1% attributable to food and fuel
What do you mean by this? If adding food and fuel raises CPI by 1%, then the food and fuel prices have necessarily raised by _more_ than the combined 3.8%.
"What do you mean by this?"
Pretty simple - an overall increase of 1% inflation is attributed to food and fuel.
Umm okay so many other aspects of the cpi respond slower and this is a recent shock…
Food and fuel are more sensitive and respond first. There’s been no time for the effects to really get into the others.
And Food and fuel having huge jumps in inflation is major visible pain for consumers.
Ah fuel and food - those classic unimportant things.
Fuel and food are excluded from core inflation not because they're unimportant (they are in fact incredibly important) but because they are much more volatile in price--going up and down in bigger increments--so that you get a more stable view of inflation by excluding them.
But it's a bit of a nasty trick because food, in particular, has inflated in price a lot the past 3 years. Some items, like sugar, are legitimately double the price they were.
For most Americans (aka: not the top 5% like SWEs), food and fuel increases hurt a lot.
Most SWEs are not top 5%. The median is about $135/yr, and a significant portion of us make under that.
The point was that a 1% increase in inflation due to food and fuel wasnt the end of the world. Does a 1% cost of living increase hurt? Sure, for many people on the margin of making ends meet it can be bad. For most people, $1 more out of $100 is survivable.
Usually from what I have seen, most SWE's partners are also in tech or "white collar adjacent" making similar money. Which makes a household income of $270k, putting them in somewhere around the top ~7.5%.
You do realize food and fuel didn’t just rise 1% on an annual basis? Right?
SWEs do feel the pain, too. Not everyone has a 200K+ gig. Especially for a big family.
I think you're misinterpreting that. Everything other than food and fuel went up 2.8%. Everything (including food and fuel) went up 3.8%. Therefore food and fuel went up more than 3.8%.
This. Energy is up 17.9% and energy commodities (oil, gas, etc.) 29.2%. See the CPI release: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm.
I think you're misinterpreting me. The overall inflation increase attributed to food and fuel increases is 1%.
The tidbid is that Maga voted for a lunatic who campaigned against "more wars", and then immediately started a war, wait it's not technically a war, it's a series of "special military operations" so he can bypass congress, in order to do insider trading, while workers and consumers get poorer.
Did I get it right?
Part of the reason people voted for "no more wars" was because of the long history of more wars from both parties. Desperate people make desperate choices.
> long history of more wars from both parties
Which wars were started by Democratic presidents in the last half-century?
Depends on what you call a “war” since the last time the US declared war was in WW II.. In terms of military operations, a partial list would probably include:
Democrat Presidents: Bosnia, Haiti, Iran, Kosovo, Libya, Niger, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.
Republican Presidents: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Grenada, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Panama, Somalia, and Syria.
It is outside the 50 year timeframe, but go back another 10 years and you have Viet Nam which caused more deaths than all the rest combined.
Seems balanced when you put them in a simple list like that, so it might not be obvious that the republican started wars cost many, many orders of magnitude more lives and treasure than the tiny actions attributed to dems.
Syria, Libya, Kosovo probably more I am just naming the ones off the top of my head.
"started by" here was used to indicate that there was not already a shooting war in progress.
If you want to get technical, the US hasn't been involved in a war since WW2. See how annoying that is?
No more wars means stop putting Americans at risk to kill foreigners.
If you're going to get technical, you need to pick apart the AUMF for Iraq.
In any case, I personally don't think the US interventions in Bosnia or Haiti rose to the level of the colloquial understanding of "no more wars." This is to the extent that the public of 2024 was even broadly aware of those interventions.
Major point is this: in the last 50 years, every GOP president has started a trillion-dollar boondoggle in the Middle East that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths or more (count is still running in Iran, which the President credibly threatens to nuke every other week). Democratic presidents have initiated e.g. peacekeeping missions or the like with definite endpoints and missions. "Both sides" elides all of this as if they are the remotely equivalent.
(I'm on record suggesting that the US military should be reduced to a footprint necessary to defend only the US states and not foreign interests. 75%+ cuts in budget as a start. 11 carrier battle groups to ~4, two per coast. etc.)
Vietnam.
While Kennedy and then Johnson escalated US support to South Vietnam significantly, Eisenhower started it.
And Nixon prolonged it in order to win an election. [1] Regular people would call that treason.
1. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vie...
This point came up in a discussion of whether the Iran war is the first US war to be started and lost by the exact same team. Vietnam was floated, but they had a few shift changes before defeat was clear.
That was more than a half-century ago.
There was literally no evidence voting for Trump would have reasonably led to less wars, and enough evidence, in fact, to the contrary.
Yes, MAGA ran on a broad platform of chaos, griefing, and personal vendettas. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to connect the dots and know war was on the agenda.
aside from the first term? guy lost his marbles after 2020 but there were no new wars in the first term and that was evidence. turns out he has different handlers this time. and dementia. but there were 4 years with no new wars. I liked that.
There is a long history of evidence that voting for establishment candidates leads to more wars and Trump didn't start any new wars in his first term and reduced troop deployments in places where existing conflicts were active so I'm not sure what you mean by no evidence. Supporters were happy about that aspect of his first term.
But, like I said, desperate people make desperate choices. If you're a person who feels strongly about something the establishment wing of both parties agrees on, anti-establishment candidates look very appealing, warts and all.
The famous, Fell for it again™ award, goes to MAGA this time.
Well, when the rich control both sides and both sides conspire to create drama to continue to control the country as they want....can't really do much. This country is done for.
The rich being in control of both sides does not make both sides equivalent when it comes to impacts on the commoner. The country is done for in large part because too many apathetic people are unable to discern very real differences in their political options, and instead of participating, you eject and poison the well on the way out which is exactly what the "rich" want you to do. You're not high-minded for your stance, you haven't figured out some secret, you're quite literally playing into their hand. Go vote in a Democratic primary and do something useful with yourself.
Whataboutism at it's finest.
If you seriously think Biden was the same as Trump (or Harris would have been worse than Trump) you need a lobotomy (as at least a refresher high school civics course).
Seriously, it was (almost) all spelled out in Project 2025. That's what the country wanted and that's what we got/are getting. I hate it, but apparently 51% of voters disagree with me.
I voted for the only candidate (Chase Oliver) that appeared on my ballot that was basically 100% certain to not get us into wars, and I've had absolute vitriol spewed at me (including here on HN) because I was informed it was a default to Trump.
There's no way to act where you won't be hated by someone. Even if you stop paying taxes for the bombs someone will scream that you hate old people or the children.
Idealism is for the primaries. You knew with certainty that Chase Oliver wasn't going to win the presidency, which meant you were okay with either of the two candidates that definitely was going to win the presidency
Only about 20% of Americans live in swing states. So for 80% of Americans, idealism is for the general as well. Or at least it could be
> I was informed it was a default to Trump.
Were they wrong?
Trump would have had the same outcome if he said "more wars". People voted for the man, not his policies.
wages have stagnated for decades now. N o o n e in the USA cares when it comes to keeping wages low at the benefit of the rich. And of course, N o o n e is defined by journalists, federal government, and billionaires.
I feel like wages have stagnated too, but data says it has been keeping up (barely) with inflation: https://www.statista.com/chart/32428/inflation-and-wage-grow...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
That's what you call stagnating wages?
That chart is rough. Q3 2025 about equivalent to 5-6 years prior.
State and local governments care?
As you’d expect from the staggeringly low (by international, 1st world standards) turnout
The very first time I thought "That's it, Trump is done, it's over" is when he complained wages were too high in the US.
Clearly he thought it was a gaffe as he denied saying it shortly after saying it twice in two videotaped appearances. But he sailed on through that and many other misteps.
Everything he says ever, all the time, should be his undoing.
And with every 'next thing' the US moves further from any pretext of democracy or rule of law.
BTW, the conflict is unlikely to resolve soon.
The US has literally never honored a deal with Iran. Iran has no reason to negotiate with the US. The US either has to back down, put boots on the ground, or sit and wait.
If the government survives, they had a quiet infrastructure investment from China they can activate to rebuild their damaged facilities.
> The US has literally never honored a deal with Iran.
It'll be better now, they killed the dad/wife/son/etc. of their new leader, this will 100% make them eager to negociate in good terms
Iran has Trumps balls in a vice.
Trump took a high risk gamble, that he would destabilize Iran and the people would overthrow the remnants. That didn't happen, and now Iran gets to inflict severe pain on the US.
I myself am delighted though, because everyone needs to get the fuck off oil, even if it's economically painful for a few years.
I understand it is a complicated calculation but to me personally, inflation feels much more than that. I have been tracking the price of milk. Around 3 months ago, i was getting a gallon of milk at $2.97, then it went up to 3.07, then 3.25. Yesterday I paid 3.40. That's like 15% gain on something as basic as milk. All numbers from the same store.
One thing I have noted during this inflationary period is that individual stores/chains are gaming pricing much more than I remember before.
For example, your store might be competing for business using the headline price of eggs and making it up on milk and bread. In our city, Whole Foods was the cheapest non-warehouse place to buy eggs for a while. Anecdotally, it looks like one could save a relatively large % on various goods simply by going to a different store, which was not the case a few short years ago.
Relative pricing stability appears to have collapsed, shopping is more intellectually-intensive now.
You are right and we did shop around for a while to optimize for the best value for the price we were paying. We ended up on a store (Aldi, in this case) which overall had the cheapest basic groceries.
Because real inflation that people feel is always much worse than the actual number. No one cares if the TVs got cheaper but everyone cares if milk and eggs are more expensive. The average number will still tell you inflation isn’t that bad. Plus variations in local pricing can affect people much more. Dense cities will see a much higher inflation rate than rural areas.
Inflation numbers are a scam, that's all, really.
They apply random multipliers to many products to account for "quality" and "performance", it completely skew the numbers and doesn't reflect the life of most people.
They even give you an example showing how the same car but with 3 more speeds, "smartphone integration" and "keyless entry" should be 3.6% inflation but actually counts as 0.6%
Same for computers, mobiles, etc.
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/vehicles.htm
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/wireless-telephone-servic...
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/personal-computers.htm
Inflation itself is not a good metric as soon as you leave the avg.
You are on HN, the chance you are part of the american average is very low.
That 15% cost is not relevant if you don't drink milk. Its also a lot less if you are able to save money. That money saved might be for something very specific like one specific car or a house.
The house market, as far as i understand it, is more decoupled from inflation than not. Here in germany a farm costs still 600k and goes up and down based on location and other factors. My money in the bank doesn't has to be inflation neutral, it should be house market neutral for the money i only want to buy a house for.
You can also choose and change your buying power. Instead of the sports car x, you can buy y. Instead of buying the city center house, you can buy the farm outside.
Our household income is less than the US household median. So that price increase on milk does feel a bit more stingy than I'd like to be.
Why?
This is not US politics. Its global politics and it affects me as well. Independent of this, hn is not a platform the avg person is visiting. It requires a certain amount of high tech expertise to understand the conent of hn which statistically pushes the avg hn reader above the avg person.
You do know how much impact the USA has around the globe right? right?!
You are wildly overestimating your own self-worth with the "above the avg person" statement. hn is just a website. People browse and read whatever.
the context is it. it requires a certain amount of knowledge and skill. IT people earn above avg.
Its not far fetched.
hey just because I am not making above median/average income doesn't mean I don't have the tech expertise. And HN is not that tech intensive. A movie recommendation for you - Good will hunting.
Yeah my large bag of whey protein (derived from milk) went up from $35 to $55. Same store and same brand.
The fed tracks this data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000709112
A better source is the USDA AMS which surveys the prices of several different milk products in retail outlets in many cities. They do this not only for milk but many common foods. The data goes back decades.
Example report https://mymarketnews.ams.usda.gov/filerepo/sites/default/fil...
milk prices go up and down even outside inflation cycles. how do you know this is inflation. price of milk at your local grocery store in last 3 months is not enough data to attribute causation.
up and down 15% every 3 months? if that's the case then I take my comment back. I am not super aware of how milk pricing works.
This has serious "the climate changes naturally" energy.
it doesnt if you care to look for many instances in data where local milk prices didnt reflect broader inflation trends.
but you are more interested in making idiotic snarky comments and feel smug.
offical inflation numbers are just LIE and wrongg for decades. Now you see it yourself. Via wrong numbers, they steal trillions
you’re not totally wrong but it’s not the outright lie you seem to imply. things like tweaks to the “standard basket” that they claim are in line with consumer preferences, which themselves changed because of inflation, for example, are one way we get a sort of hidden shrink flation.
But it is a lie, all the basics are skyrocketing and all the useless tech gadgets are getting cheaper (or better, which counts as deflation for them). If food is 30% more expensive but cars/TVs are 0% more expensive but 10 times "better" you get an overall "3% inflation"
They adopted a new way to adjust inflation in 1990, and since then everything has been perfect lmao: https://www.shadowstats.com/imgs/sgs-cpi.gif?hl=ad&t=
I disagree and think GP poster is right on the money.
There are many ways in which inflation numbers are cooked; just one of them is the hedonic adjustment [1].
Others include an un-representative basket of goods.
The basket of goods is adjusted every 2 years, but not necessarily in a way that mirrors the way real households adapt their spending patterns to increased prices.
Owner equivalent rent (LOL) massively lags behind home prices.
Honestly, when 10s or hundreds of millions of people's perception does not match *Official Government Numbers*, then it's reason to suspect that the official numbers are a poor metric.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/
What I don’t understand is how the stock market can be so decoupled from reality. It’s a game at this point and completely disconnected from reality. Everything should be down 20%+ given oil is an input to everything and yet stocks are ATHing.
Lesson from 2021:
Stocks (naturally) price in inflation before inflation becomes headlines everywhere. People uncertain about the dollar trying to shelter their wealth from inflation will move to stocks to shield themselves.
When you are inject 3-5 trillion dollars into the economy over the span of months, it takes a while for reality to catch up.
idk, I read an analysis recently that retail investors in funds like the S&P500 are breaking how the stock market is "supposed" to work since people keep pumping the same money every month for retirement into the same 500 companies (or whatever an index is funding) without consequence to their actions, so they're never punished. Line goes up. The purchasing power of the masses outweighs the old brokerage class that decided which companies succeeded based on "real merits".
Probably very true, very simplified.
The best strategy then would be to know when the retirement fund money stops doing this due to age pyramid collapse i would assume.
Aren’t we approximately there? The boomers are all starting to draw down for retirement.
On paper the US is good for another 20yrs, boomers had lots of children and the US had very generous immigration policies.
Agreed but there is definitely sector rotation still that all the banks / insiders can play for an extra few points
M2 is only up $1T in 7 months or am I missing something?
I've always rolled my eyes at inflation because clearly, it's worse than the basket of goods they use to monitor. Groceries probably get incentives to keep bread, eggs, etc. prices somewhat regulated so the inflation number is muted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Many of the inputs (farms, oil) are heavily subsidized already. Meat, milk, etc. but I'm sure they account for that in some way.
this is core inflation no? it's interesting that it doesn't account for food and energy. so likely much higher in reality...
https://apnews.com/article/us-inflation-consumer-iran-war-3f...
Consumer Price Index (CPI) vs Core CPI
The above link is a little dumb because their own graph only goes up to March. But it looks like in March Core CPI was 2.6% while CPI was 3.3%.
Still, the details are in the text:
> Excluding volatile food and energy costs, so-called consumer core prices rose 0.4% last month from March and 2.8% from April 2025
A completely unnecessary war that benefits no one other than Israel and harms the rest of the world. The only positive to come from this is the annihilation of US military assets in the Middle East and an even deeper unity of the world against Zionism. It’s tough times but we will ultimately defeat this heinous ideology.
>benefits no one
isn't correct. There are plenty of people on HN working in military contract industries, high tech arms manufacturing and such. They lobby Gov and benefit financially as do their employees.
Ok, benefits no one other than Israel AND American warlords.
Only certain types of contractors, and likely only in the short term.
Military contractors do well when the military has widespread support from the voters. Congresscritters will happily approve tax dollars going to the military industrial complex when their constituents view the US as the global protector of democracy. Wars like this one that aren't popular and make us look like thugs open the floor up to anti-military candidates. So yeah, the companies building missiles do well while the war is on, but the people like me who automate military fuel farms see budget cuts and projects cancelled.
I wonder if it does benefit arms R&D folks. At least, as someone not too well informed on the military stuff, it looks like the moral of the story has been that our high-end stuff hasn’t functioned as well as the price tag lead us to expect, and a bunch of cheap drones might be the way to go.
If I worked in military R&D I’d be worried that focus might shift away from the more speculative/less delivery-oriented/fun to work on products…
I could see this happening if the point of the arms industry was defense and not a jobs program.
Domestically maybe, but international buyers aren't giving billions to American arms manufacturers to prop up American jobs.
The mayor's rock-throwing spree is doing wonders for growth in the town's window repair sector!
Russia is also benefiting. China less so, but it gives them advantage in their competition with west.
China is going to be selling solar panels and EVs at triple the previously projected rate after this crisis.
There was a time when USA guaranteed the safe passage of shipping, which helped secure a peaceful world order, apparently. I view this as a continuation of that legacy, but admit I only have 1-2 books supporting this view.
Soooo just to be clear here with your argument:
The USA was doing something to guarantee that stuff can flow through it, then they start a war, now they can no longer guarantee this?
Did they suddenly loose the power to protect this flow?
Just because USA is war mongering, doesn't mean no one else would have stepped up or that it wouldn't be better without all of this involvment.
Everything I said was true : Bretton woods exists, and my opinion flows from that. Feel free to disregard it or correct the facts, I think that'd be a good discussion.
And yeah, USA might do dumb things that put them into a bind, but ultimately the peaceful flow of traffic through Hormuz is a goal worth pursuing for the world economic health.
How is closing the strait a continuation of a legacy of guaranteed safe passage?
I wasn't aware USA closed the stait
This is some extraordinary up-is-down construction. Hormuz was open in February, and for decades preceding that. It's closed now. How is this situation the result of the "guarantee of safe passage of shipping", exactly?
Frankly, it is a miracle that inflation is this low. Markets have not fully metabolized the impact from the closure of the Persian Gulf.
I keep thinking this but... line keep going up.
I've seen reporting that energy prices won't return to pre-war levels this calendar year, even assuming an immediate return to the status quo basically right now (which seems unlikely).
I find the whole thing really confusing. The facts I can see with my own eyes suggest high inflation and this surely means no substantial rate cuts (which... the market has expected) if not reduced consumer spending and risk of recessions.
But the markets think everything is... fine? So... what are we missing here?
I should invest a non-trivial amount. That usually results in markets trending down.
We probably aren't missing anything. It just can't happen right now because if the stock market capitulates then it does so for years and everyone loses a bunch of money. Their only option is to hope for some kind of end or bailout or whatever that keeps getting further away, and they've pushed that hope way past reason.
> But the markets think everything is... fine? So... what are we missing here?
The current rally is extremely narrow, mostly just AI/Big Tech and chip stocks. But yeah, the "market" appears to believe that this will all be over soon, which seems unlikely to me.
> what are we missing here?
Markets is just gambling but the gamblers wear suits and pretend things are respectable.
It doesn't need to make sense, line just needs to go up. It works until it doesn't.
energy pricing is complex. some food for thought:
if everyone believes the straight of hormuz is open, even if it is not, even if 20% less oil is being moved globally, what happens to oil prices? what happens to oil deliveries?
is it possible for oil to be cheap in America while Bangladesh experiences shortages, instead of everyone paying more?
is oil the same as energy? or is it more relevant to transportation?
does it matter? suburban life is quite comfortable, a LOT of people keep choosing big single family home with yard, drive everywhere. driving everywhere is VERY comfortable. a lot of people like it. are they willing to pay more for it? does buying a house that is MUCH cheaper by virtue of being far away from a city stop making sense for 250m americans just because gas is 50% more expensive?
I assume this is a rhetorical question. The Strait is a global shipping channel; a lot of basic commodities flow through it. Not just oil. Fertilizer, grain, basic chemicals are dependent on the channel being open. Today, the WFP was stating that food aid to Somalia has been delayed by 1+ month because of the war.
i don't own a car, i bike everywhere with young kids. i like public transport. we're not talking about that. people fucking LOVE cars. they LOVE single family homes. everywhere, in every community.
Energy pricing is quite easy: We have a global market, the rich people win.
The USA is responsible for this horrendes situation, the USA people will not be the people struggling and dying.
Its the poor people in every country around the globe which literaly will die, while the rich countries will just continue doing whatever they were doing.
Holidays, traveling to visit famiily and friends. It will cost more for sure but you will still do it.
The poor can't afford the food anymore because cooking becomes more expensive. going to your daily job becomes more expensive. The likelyhood of people is getting destroyed beecause the small jobs, the niche jobs are suddenly uprooted. Like the small tuktuk or the cheap and dangerous bus for 6 people is too expensive suddenly.
I wonder how many Americans realize that their soft power is dead. Will it cost them?
I have read so many arguments on this site that soft power in fact, apparently does not exist. So, you can't lose what didn't exist in the first place. So I guess a special military operation or two is no problem, according to them.
The average family spends something like $5,000 on gas a year, maybe $10k. Gas could double and it’d be felt, but it’s still just a portion of total spend.
We’ve had $4 gas before (20 years ago?!) and it was annoying but it didn’t end the world.
The perspective from over here in HN land is very skewed.
According to the US Census, median household income in 2024 was $80,000. Add federal and state income tax* of 30%, and you're left with $56,000. Rent in lower-cost areas is around $12,000 ($1k/mo.) and health insurance (assuming ACA, not fancy private plans) is another $7000. Utility prices vary wildly but average something like $450-500 (so $6000 per year). if you don't live in a particularly high-cost area and skip luxuries like home Internet service or media subscriptions.
That's just over $30,000 left over per year for all household expenses, including "luxuries" like food, clothes, and car and home maintenance. Heaven forbid you have loans (car, student, etc.) or any revolving credit debt.
The difference between $5k and $10k in fuel costs is therefore easily 15% vs. 35% of total "inessential" spending. With food and other goods consistently been driven up by inflation and tariffs, there's just no margin for an "average" family.
(Sources vary for the above; US Census comes data from its own website, rent from TIME, health costs from Forbes, and utilities from move.org. Feel free to find better reference numbers if you doubt the above.)
*- yes, not all states charge income tax; most of the ones that don't have other taxes (sales, gas, property) to make up the gap
> The average family spends something like $5,000 on gas a year, maybe $10k.
Half of that.
https://www.fool.com/money/research/gas-prices/
You're forgetting the downstream effects of high gas prices though
> is it possible for oil to be cheap in America while Bangladesh experiences shortages, instead of everyone paying more?
I think the US has been ramping up domestic oil production for a while, creating an interesting situation where (global) prices are high but (domestic) supply is healthy. Prices are up at the pump in the US, but I'm not sure how much of that OPEC+ price-fixing or "risk premium".
In 2015, the US lifted its ban on exporting domestic oil. Since then, US domestic pricing has been linked to the global price.
This means that "domestic production" does not mean what you imply (which is "domestic production that must be sold in the US.") If US producers can make more money selling 100% of domestic production overseas, they will do that.
This is not price-fixing, it is the predictable outcome of a market design where US drivers bid against Asian airlines for petroleum products.
Oil is fungible. Oil producers are going to sell it to whoever pays the most. There is no law that says US oil producers have to sell it to US customers. Having domestic supply does nothing to insulate US consumers from higher prices.
i live in the suburbs and gas could 2x, 3x in price and my wallet wouldn't notice. i fill up a couple times a month.
Many products are shipped half way across the US on semi trucks, that hits everyone’s pockets even if you drive an EV.
Train’s move around vast amounts of freight but they got optimized for coat per ton for coal, wheat, etc not latency. Which then plays havoc if you try and do just in time manufacturing etc using them. Airfare and thus airfreight is simply dominated by fuel costs which hits many industries in ways that are less obvious but still expensive.
I live in a major shipping center in a state with a lot of agriculture.
I think that's why my grocery prices haven't gone nuts. For instance, I buy whole chickens (local-grown, free-range) for 99c/lb regularly.
Looking at my receipts, I spend a few hundred/week at this $KROGER. And that includes buying alcohol and non-food items like charcoal, cat litter, diapers, cleaning supplies.
The transaction costs of selling the median home is like $40k. Buys a lot of gas.
Not to mention that I'd still want a car in the city. Half a decade ago I paid more for parking in the city than I do for gas in the burbs.
How often do you buy groceries? How are groceries transited over to your local store?
I buy groceries 5-7 times a week. I buy things pretty by-need, for the next thing I'm cooking.
I can walk to my local $KROGER or drive 1min (which I do when I'm buying more than I want to carry.)
I assume they get to the store the same way they get to the stores in the cities. On trucks. A lot of what I buy (meat and produce) is grown in the state I live in. So I can make a 6-serving chicken and orzo dish for under $15 easily, for instance. I got it down to $10 when the meat is BOGO too.
Well unlike when he and Jerome Powell unleashed the money printer on us in 2020 and it took most of Biden's term to tame inflation, this should last as long as the Iran war. Unless there's a permanent shift in the strait or sticky consumer prices overcome the efficient market.
now imagine this going on through January 2029 if Dems don't win the Senate too
because it took YEARS for Obama's team to get them to sign something
and he's already used up half of US war stockpiles
Iran's dictators will eat and sleep just fine for years while their people starve and get bombed to death
click on YTD here and imagine that flat-line for YEARS
https://en.macromicro.me/charts/94482/imf-strait-of-hormuz-n...
I would imagine that other powers of the world would support some kind of invasion if the strait were to remain closed for a long period of time
They might support it in spirit, but an actual invasion of the US would be pretty difficult to pull off.
I can see sanctions though, maybe a re-shuffling of alliances where China becomes the world's default Adult In The Room.
They will just pay the toll.
It's possible, in the short term, but eventually the only oil flowing thru the Strait of Hormuz will be Iranian oil, and perhaps not even that. Give countries enough time and they'll rather invest in building a way around Iran than giving them money for passage thru international waters.
Or they finally tell Trump to fuck off as he as no tariff leverage any more as their economies are cooked anyway?
It is funny watching economies like Japan -- where their new prime minister was fluffing Trump like crazy -- get fully screwed.
Given what has happened, I don't think Iran's dictators are going to be sleeping just fine for a while.
They have more dictators in store it seems.
"US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war"
and all of this to support apartheid in israel.
This is what climate activists want, although of course they would like to see the price of fossil fuels go much higher.
I am a climate activist and I don't want this, because temporarily reduced supply and spiking prices do not do any long-term damage to the oil companies, if anything they just make more money. What I would like to see is a steep drop in demand resulting in lower prices because nobody needs to buy oil and gas anymore.
No, this is what the madman in the White House failed to anticipate, even though he was explicitly told that this would happen.
'climate activists' wanted a revenue neutral carbon tax that would simultaneously lower everyone's income taxes. Thus giving people the ability to 'lower their taxes' with greener choices while the energy intensive activities of the rich were harder to dodge (hard to power their private jets with electrons)
What is your comment adding to this discussion?
Do you want to say, that a specific small group of people are positive about a surge in energy costs?
How does that reflect your acceptance of the overall climate change topic you are referencing?
You do not believe in it? Or do you believe in it but you do not care? Like the latest AMOC paper doesn't bother you in particular?
Am I a climate activist if i think its very bad on one side but at least pushes more people into independent reneable energy sources?
What do you think about the thing that Trump, the Clown of the USA, is directly responsible for it? Do you think Trump is a climate activist?
You're wasting your breath. It took me a long time to realize that folks on the other side of the isle had fully bought into the 'maximal short term interest' ideology of the business community. I no longer have very much to say to them at all.
I just think it's amusing that this is presented as a very bad thing in the context of Trump, but it's what climate activists have been seeking (only more so). When climate activists pursue this goal, it's presented as a laudable self sacrifice we must accept.
Because there is a gigantic difference between "I will now change the lives of everyone on the planet just because and in a very short period of time without thinking about any long term goals or consequences" vs. "we want the planet to be habital for our children and for everyone affected by this, lets start pushing for investing into renewable energy instead of just burning fossil fuels".
Even tarifs in general are not necessarily a bad idea, its a horrendes bad idea if you wiggle your thumb around, guess numbers from 0-100 and higher, let that be printed on a piece of cardboard and present it to the world as the current leader of the biggest co2 producer and military power on the whole planet affecting suddenly everyone.
You do see the issue i hope?
Climate activists, as a whole, have not been able to materially affect costs positively or negatively, in any sector other than maybe TED talks and documentaries.
Ironically Trump may end up being the most pro green energy president at the end of all of this.
Yeah, funny, all the people that turned away from EVs because the subsidies were going away suddenly realize that EVs and renewables are a much more resilient combo than being reliant on fossil fuels and their refining network.
Pro golf green.
I did not seen climate activists demand to prevent shipping of 20% of world fertilizer and to start war with Iran.
They did pushed for wind and solar electricity.
We got both, so twice as good.
Should have been jumps BY 3.8%
No, it’s saying inflation increased from 3.3% to 3.8%, the article is correct.
Jumps by 15%!
Don't you know that on HN, if the theory does not agree with the facts about US, so much the worse for the facts.