I can't escape the impression that the person currently most responsible for these shortsighted decisions simply doesn't care what happens after he's gone.

Now, either (except, of course, to himself).

There's something particularly pathetic about lauding a guy for not taking a $400K yearly salary when he spends $4M a weekend on taxpayer money playing golf, but that's what you get when we've spent the better part of the past 50 years demonizing social programs and the people who have been forced to rely on them.

For a massive part, if not the majority of his voter base, they don't get to experience assets and investments that aren't their regular salary or wages and the physical items they purchase with them. They don't get high value benefits, vesting stocks, or auid pro other than bartering with their pees. From that perspective, forgoing a salary seems like a huge personal sacrifice.

It is fascinating how there are two current opinions about Donald Trump and that one is that he is a serial liar and the other is that he tells it how it is. I'm sympathetic to the latter because he manages to talk without a filter, but the things he lies about are much more serious and much more obvious and much more dangerous. But it gets him very far because people seem to think that "owning the libs" is the success condition for domestic and foreign policy.

I agree though, the next 3 years are going to be him insisting things are great. China will probably try for Taiwan after he leaves and he'll just continue to say things like they wouldn't have done it if he was in office. And sure that's partly true, because why not just wait a year until he's gone, then China can really split the electorate on what we should do.

> I'm a heavy gamer. I like lots of strategy games.

Politicians should have to play several hundred hours of 4X games (Civ 4/5/6/7, Stellaris, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron) before they're allowed to run for office.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X

If they can't beat some of these videos at the highest difficulty settings they should not be allowed to break things IRL.

I'm curious on your take on the necessity for political leaders to master the "exterminate" prong of the 4X?

The thing is, a game is a tool with a surface-level set of rules, and a ton of implicit belief systems of how the (game) world works.

You could say someone might become a shrewd negotiator by playing Monopoly, but that is based on a narrow set of winning negotiation strategies which either the game builders have consciously built their game around, or emerge due to their cultural/personal biases or even come up unexpectedly from the rules of the game.

So filtering your leader(s) this way requires agreement that the ideology promoted by the game(s) is what the people want to live under.

> I'm curious on your take on the necessity for political leaders to master the "exterminate" prong of the 4X?

Civilization, for one, has scientific and cultural victory conditions, and not just military. Stellaris takes economic and technological factors into account.

But the main skill in being able to "win" is the ability to balance various needs of the population: economic, technology, happiness, crime, foreign threats. And it may not even be able "winning" but about how you play the game: all potential candidates could be given several randomly generated seed, and their gameplay is available for evaluation. Some seeds could be militaristic species, others pacifists; some capitalists, some collectivists; etc, with the expectation that you don't (necessarily) play how you'd like the society to be, but role play as the species at it is: so you may be a pacifist, but you have to play as a militarist if that's what the species is in-game.

If you can't wrap your head around the interconnectedness of resources in something as simple as a video game, what chance do you have IRL?

Further, this can be a filter and not the filter.

If this is such a good filter - has it been used elsewhere? I know US military tried to hire gamers before to fly drones.

On a flip side - politics is deeply social game. My mental image of gamers is very opposite of social (yes I know many games nowadays are social).

> On a flip side - politics is deeply social game. My mental image of gamers is very opposite of social (yes I know many games nowadays are social).

On the flip-flip side, the US has a president which seems to have a high 'charisma score' and very little grasp on reality.

Being able to wrap your head around the interconnectedness of resources in something as simple as a video game is just one factor. I'd like to know how much candidates can deal with the complexities with something as 'simple' as video game society: they could suck at it, and that could be fine if they have other qualities, but it could be a useful data point.

Can confirm, building a startup scratches much of the same itch as playing Civ — I would say one of the primary differences is that it requires immense growth in interpersonal skills to be able to execute any strategy effectively.

Any 4X recs for mobile? I had fun with Polytopia.

It's hard not to zoom out and look at the world as a game at times. If you do that, and go back way more than 10 years, it feels like every country is playing terribly.

Countries used to routinely go on domination quests for land and resources. They used to go find exotic lands and claim them as their own. They used to harvest resources and enslave the losers.

Now, not so much. If you watched it zoomed out as a game, you'd assume the powerful players all got bored with it and gave up.

Of course, realizing it's not a game but real people, you realize the world collectively is probably in a better place. But it also means powerful countries giving up power, which is weird to see happen.

>Countries used to routinely go on domination quests for land and resources. They used to go find exotic lands and claim them as their own. They used to harvest resources and enslave the losers.

This is not a golden age to look back on fondly. That was colonialism. That was the world wars. That was the bleakest era in human history.

That doesn't mean power games don't exist anymore though. The order that prevents regression to the above is held in place by peaceful competition and a threat that nobody wants to relive those horrific experiences. Yet the leaders lived through these horrors are gone, replaced by their children who seem to not have a healthy fear of the depths of depravity humans can fall to. Instead focused on personal wealth accumulation to the exclusion of all else, and if the structures that prevent global war are in the way of that well they need to go.

To me it doesn't look like the powerful have given up power, it seems as concentrated as ever. It is more that the concept of a nation isn't that useful to them under globalization at least not in the same way.

Some of this is due to changes in technology. For example as farming improved with the green revolution shear land area counted for less, and shipping and refrigeration allow longer distance imports.

So rather than land area control you see more localized strategic resource control. Things like mines, oil fields, shipping lanes etc.

The United States has benefited tremendously by having global peace and free trade in the developed world. And the rest of the world generally has as well.

It's simply not in the United States' best interest to go colonizing militarily, nor is it in other countries' if the sole super power is providing stability.

Indeed, to go along with your analogy it does feel like we have chosen to go for a "All in rush", rather that try and compound marginal advantage. Sometimes that does work, but is can be a really chaotic where small perturbations can wildly swing the outcome.

To me the most wild thing about our current circumstance is the abstraction away from the real with financialization. Pretending that money basically has unlimited optionality and liquidity in the future without having to manage, maintain and develop the resources, capabilities, infrastructure, and environment for the long future not just the next few quarters.

Especially when it comes to investing for retirement. So much people are delegating their excess to grow the "market" which by in large is destroying the foundations for that very retirement by chasing maximal growth of money while destroying the underlying systems (healthcare, housing, social and environmental stability).

Maybe this is the best we can do due to adversarial constraints and the current system state. But that is a pretty depressing thought.

Americans today are incapable of envisioning a better future and incapable of envisioning a worse one! We as a society are now only able to focus on what problems exist now, and to demand that they are fixed tomorrow.

There are a lot of problems that can be solved over decades, but we can no longer even fathom such a thing, much less put together the will power to see such projects through.

> It feels like we are in a weaker position then ever: militaristically, > economically, scientifically, and so on. Meanwhile the threats of China > and Russia and what could happen in the next few years are quite concerning.

On the other hand, it's not only USA really.

Russia with their czarist structure of power and control hasn't really had an economy that's more sustainable than USSR ever pretended to have, and their government keeps digging the country further in the grave as we speak. Russia can be a nuisance to its neighbours by their size alone but as their failing offensive in Ukraine shows they don't really give much to worry about in their peer countries of similar size and position.

Europe is running around like a group of headless chicken pecking eachother with minimal ability to make decisions cohesively and in unison, and many larger European countries are trampling knee deep in the mud when you compare to their heydays.

China is indebted, lacking energy, yet wants to expand their projection of military power but having enough to do with their current neighbours and desperately needing to maintain trade relations around the world means that, at best, the ruling party can only think about it. Unlike some other peer nation states I think they just might ultimately be wise enough to understand their position themselves, too, despite the desire to posture hard.

Further, I can name many countries that are, in relative terms, doing similarly stupid things now that they didn't do before and few that have actually managed to preserve some common sense but they're either small enough to not matter a squat on the global stage or they aren't interested in global power in the first place.

Not that USA isn't actively destroying the very relations that did help them extend their power across the globe cheaply through allies, working to weaken the dollar, and in internal affairs shooting themselves in the foot at a rate that could make even Russia jealous, but USA is still pretty good in comparison to their competition. There's no serious contender for USA at the moment and won't be any time soon even if USA keeps hitting even lower and lower bars of statehood.

I'm more pessimistic than optimistic about the future but the reason is that it seems the world as a whole has enshittified themselves down to a level that would have seemed even theoretically impossible by the key players only a few decades ago.

In my eyes China seems to have a very strong position. They have invested so heavily in optimizing their industries, regulations, etc. that they really seem to operate many orders of magnitude more efficiently than anyone else.

They also have a great advantage in their communistic structure. If they decide on a big project, pivot, allocation of resources for long-term strategy, they just do it. You don't have to convince citizens or states. They just do it if it makes strategic sense.

Those benefits often seem to outweigh the issues of citizen happiness, cohesion, government support. China has gotten incredibly good at controlling their citizens such that dissent seems like a pretty small issue for them to deal with.

As I understand, China is facing some difficulty scaling up food production for strong food security. I'm not familiar with their issues regarding power generation, but I'm curious to know more. While I'm not surprised they are indebted, like almost every other country in the world, I don't see that stopping them from ignoring the rest of the world when they don't think anyone else can stop them. Whenever tensions reach a breaking point.

On top of all that, China seems to have a lot of good talent, particular in the technology sector. We are at the precipice of an AI and drone-enabled world war, and if a country were to make vast strides in that technology to get ahead of peers, the power differential could be quite scary. And if any country has the industry and resources to produce tons of such weapons at scale, I'd expect it to be China, maybe with some help from their allies.

China has been a rising star for a long time, albeit not without its share of problems obviously. I heartily agree there's a lot of momentum in China to the direction of things getting better whereas traditional western countries lack much of that, and might even ride a momentum for the worse. And China's centrally-led government can be very effective and more sophisticated, in a way most other dictatorships simply aren't. But China is still too weak to make moves. Their domestic policy and handling of their internal affairs eats up their resources of force, and they also have a long border full of territorial skirmishes they can't just ignore while acting out militarily. It's hard to see China being able to make a move that would be a threat to West and that wouldn't cost way too much. China can certainly posture threats left and right, but I think they understand they don't necessarily need to consider carrying out those threats for real. They also know the art of patience, and together with that and some effective propaganda they can just sit, wait, and slowly move the piece towards their favour, and there's some calm wisdom in that that I greatly appreciate. The constant talks and news we see about a threat posed by China is likely a significant part of just that.

Most of my early 30 year old friends are very pessimistic about the future. I am pessimistic but less so. I think (and hope) that the republic will still be standing. But what I see and expect is that Trump will spend his time doing performative actions. He is narcissistic and he conflates the deference he receives when flying around the world negotiating trade deals with deference to the US. The reality is that telling him he deserves the Nobel peace prize is easy pickings for politicians who don't want to tank their economies while they realign with Russia.

Ultimately I think where we end up after his second term is he leaves, he says he did a great job and his supporters believe him. But we have problems. And he has this fantastic blessing of controlling all 3 branches of government, which he is wasting by grabbing power and solving NONE of them. So really we just wasted 4 years. And where the world is right now it's probably the worst 4 years we could ever waste.

*realign with China