of course, then you get vote bribing and retaliation. i'm generally in favor of public or provable voting because i think it is the best solution - but you do have to sort of how eyes wide open.
We are a society of adults and complex individuals that don't need to be moralized to or nanny'ed.
You can easily bring up bribing and retaliation as excuses why we shouldn't have jury trials either. These were never really fundamental problems with open democracy, like Andrew Jackson didn't bribe everyone in the country to become president.
TBH if a politician offered me $100 to listen to his pitch, I would take it but I would still vote based on the thousands of dollars of lifetime impact of their policies on my income and assets.
I’m curious when people make comments like this, do they actually live in the US and believe this or has the media environment gotten so bad in Europe+ that people have no clue what’s real or not?
Do you have any criticisms to the parent comment? As an American, they seem pretty spot on to the current climate.
I'd argue we've never been closer to civil war than we are today[0], primarily due to trumps regime invading cities around the country, kidnapping citizens utilizing a bounty program, and killing people in concentration camps.
Ediot: [0] - Since the last civil war. I thought that was obvious, but it seems like it isn't.
A new civil war that drives the US to fragment into several independent regions over the course of the next ~five years would kind of be the best scenario from a global perspective.
We’ve apparently abandoned the meaning of the word “best,” for staters.
> For countries outside the US, it would actually not be a bad scenario.
I really don’t think I can help you, but the two obvious crazy ideas encompassed here are that civil wars never turn into wider regional conflicts and that losing a major trading partner never tanked an economy. Or that the ideological conflict here won’t possibly spread anywhere else (did you not even notice Vance and Musk’s support of afd ?) Good luck with all that.
I don't think it's all that nutty, considering that large regional blocs in the United States basically voted against all this and have less than zero desire to be dragged along for the ride, having our lives ruined for someone else's insanity.
The last Civil War in the U.S. had States banding together and separating from the Union.
The closest the U.S. is to a Civil War now is akin to a Cold Civil War with, for example, states gerrymandering their Representative districts. Or the Pacific states joining together for West Coast Health Alliance. Did I read rumblings about separate trade deals with foreign countries?
Protesters battling ICE in the streets would not, in my opinion, count as Civil War. Civil unrest? Sure.
EDIT: this always turns out to be one of my unpopular opinions. Oh well.
I think you misunderstand who participates in a civil war, at least initially. It's not always the citizens, in this case it's the state militia and the federal government. We are dangerously close to that.
I agree that it's silly to say "we're as close as we ever have...", but the rest of GPs point stands. Things are bad, and just because you're not seeing it and are rich enough to not care doesn't mean it's not happening.
It's still absurd. Today isn't close to what we saw during the depression or the 70s or desegregation or the Rodney King riot. Besides that, there's no plausible fault line in the military or any sort of ethnic or religious or regional fault line where two sides could form to fight each other.
We don't live in the meth lab downstairs, we're in the apartment above it. It's been wild in the past couple of decades, but lately you guys have started taking pot shots at the ceiling, so yeah, we're watching.
I think you're missing the criticism, which is not just that an armed civil war is extremely unlikely even given everything happening in the US, if it did happen, it would not splinter the US regionally.
The divide here is urban vs rural. There's no way to turn that into a set of successor regions.
If armed conflict does happen, it'll be much more amorphous, terrifying, and random, concentrated in the cities, and resemble things like the Tulsa massacre at a larger scale.
I don't think an American civil war in the next 5 years is at all likely. The rest of your comment I understand - not much we can say beyond we're sorry and his support is a small (but influential) minority.
> I don't think an American civil war in the next 5 years is at all likely.
The government of Minnesota has readied the national guard, the Pentagon put 1500 soldiers on standby to be deployed to Minnesota, Trump is threatening to invoke the insurrection act, and there's no sign of this conflict cooling off.
5 years is a long time too, I don't see how you believe it's not at all likely.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not sure it will lead to the fragmentation that the other commenters was claiming. But an conflict between federal and state law enforcement/ military seems likely.
On the contrary. The ones that want to see dead Americans are currently sitting in the Whitehouse. Mostly because it won't be them on the receiving end of it and they get to plunder the country. Smaller cake, but more for me seems to be their motto.
I think perhaps multiple people can want to see dead Americans. There is definitely a subtext of glee in this discussion of modern American civil war imo.
Not with the Europeans that I know, they are all absolutely aghast at every single murder. It is one of the reasons EU countries are reluctant about participating in any war, they always hope to avoid it (and as a result sometimes get much larger ones...).
Hard for me to see anyone who says an American civil war is a best case scenario as not cheering for American deaths and I'm skeptical that this was written by an American as it sounds far too out of touch and 'wishcasty' as someone else said.
In other comments on their profile, they refer to Americans as if they are someone other than themselves. Also, the belief that a civil war splitting up the US is likely within the next 5 years seems like a pretty big giveaway.
> Those guys in the Whitehouse, are they not American?
As I said, multiple people can want bad things. I'm painfully aware of what the current admin is doing to our global reputation and what they are risking with their current games - and there are still 3 years on the clock.
Whether it is likely or not has no bearing on whether they want that to happen. I don't want it to happen. I still think it is not entirely unlikely. But that's not on the observers.
It's going to be a very long three years. Or a very short one. That choice is not up to the rest of the world but up to the USA.
From the perspective of these allies it is better that American descends into a small civil war and sorts this shit out now rather than it keep simmering and escalting into a global conflict where more people including more Americans die.
Why? The US is only 5% of the world population. If others successfully disentangle themselves before the civil war begins they can take steps to isolate themselves. Yes it won't be as peaceful of a world but I don't see how it is certain to end up in a WWIII scenario.
Do you think the newly minted American Balkans are going to be peaceful and well governed? And won't, say, try to annex parts of canada, mexico, greenland, central american or island nations, etc? Do you think they will be lead by well reasoned and insightful peoples that won't escalate to a nuclear civil war and that no foreign power will try to intervene, take sides, or try to grab some real estate as well?
You think the most well funded and capable military in the world would sit idle and please itself with keeping conflict contained?
Who are you referring to? Citizens doing this? 70% of the country is fat (large portion of that is also dangerously obese)
If your scenario plays out they will also be broke so that military may not be able to be funded. I wouldnt say its impossible but a civil war would break the country such that a lot of the aspects that make you fearful also cease to exist.
You have to ask yourself, compared to current US leadership, is China actually all that bad?
US is being driven by the personal whims of a deteriorating tyrant, Congress is allowing it and the courts are only doing a tiny amount of checking his power.
You can't just say "despite everything happening we're still the good guys and China and Russia are the bad guys!"
Osama bin Ladin won. The goals he had when he attacked America have been entirely achieved. Americans got stupid and became susceptible to the society changing effects of terrorism. He got us to destroy ourselves.
Or why GOP legislatures in states like Wisconsin or North Carolina remove powers from Governor, AG and other elected positions only when Democrats win but not when Republicans do?
Having free elections doesn't make you the good guys if you elect a tryant to be a tyrant. Republicans are getting what they voted for and they STILL want what's happening. I've heard them say it.
This leftist idea that everything will just be ok and we don't need to do anything because it'll all be fixed in the next election needs to stop.
Right now the only people actually protecting the republic are the people in the streets because NOBODY else is accomplishing anything.
> Republicans are getting what they voted for and they STILL want what’s happening.
Trump was elected as a specific reaction to the previous administration’s immigration policies. You’re right that voters supported that, but they didn't sign up for the rest. If you look at the polling, the tariffs and the Greenland push are explicitly unpopular.
> having free elections doesn’t make you the good guys if you elect a tyrant.
it does. The point of democracy is that voters make mistakes. Even European countries have elected tyrants in the past. The difference is that a free system allows you to survive a bad leader and vote them out; an authoritarian one doesn't.
This excessive faith in democracy is problematic. The founders of the United States, the Romans, and the Athenian philosophers who came up with democracy all openly talked about one of the risks of democracy in mob rule. Sometimes the most popular idea is in fact not nice. Good things don't just automatically come from adding a little democracy to the mix.
Sometimes (it's not so rare) the majority of people WANT horrible things to be perpetuated by their government. It isn't just "mistakes" or being tricked or some sort of scam, governments act with the consent of the people and a ruling majority voting for atrocities is not uncommon.
I'm not saying democracy is bad, but I am saying it's delusional to think that just having democracy cures all ills.
---
I have heard first hand people I know, seen people in videos online, and seen plenty of comments online to the tune of "ICE is doing EXACTLY what we want, keep going". A lot of people want exactly what has happened and while I think either the majority is eroding or already lost in support for these things, it is by no means a landslide in public opinion against the rising fascist politics in America. Sitting by and expecting to win the next election and just gritting your teeth until then is not the right response.
A huge portion of why this has happened is democratic "knowledge" that they deserve to win so they will, and making really bad political decisions based on this attitude.
He's sent his personal police force to my city to rip people out of their cars and arrest them for being brown, not to mention murdering a lady who seconds before was smiling and waving officers to go around. In no way is this an exaggeration.
He's trying to use economic warfare to annex Greenland.
The most powerful man in the world is a delusional dementia patient and egomaniac being allowed to do literally anything he wants.
China is buying 50% of Russian gas and supplying them with drone parts and gunpowder which is directly used to kill Europeans and destabilize Europe.
They are also exporting their surveillance state technology to dictatorships in Pakistan, Iran, and Venezuela. Look at Iran, 16000 protestors are dead in two weeks. That is the Chinese model of stability.
Bad leaders exist everywhere, Europe included. But in the US, they leave. Trump is gone in two years. Good luck aligning your economies and value systems with China. I’m firmly on the side of liberal democracy.
The US just kidnapped the leader of Venezuela, Iran got into this theocratic regime situation in the first place because of US interference, and our closest NATO allies are legitimately preparing for war with the US and decrying the new world order. Not to mention the previous decades of destabilizing, arming, overthrowing, etc. many many countries to serve our own self interest.
You're a European leader looking at this situation frankly trying to decide whose atrocities and foreign policy is worse, it's not exactly obvious and choosing China because at least China isn't trying to annex your neighbors and is behaving rationally even if it's not nice things it's predictable.
There's a big difference between "We're the good guys, we stopped the bad things happening in our country before they started" and "I know we're doing awful things but I bet it'll stop soon with our next election".
> Osama bin Ladin won. The goals he had when he attacked America have been entirely achieved. Americans got stupid and became susceptible to the society changing effects of terrorism. He got us to destroy ourselves.
I think one of the effects of American narcissism and stupidity is not understanding that Osama bin Laden's primary goal was to replace the Saudi royal family with a Caliphate of his design, and no, he never actually accomplished that. He wasn't about us.
I get what you're saying and mostly somewhat agree with your point, but it's kind of funny thinking back and feeling the complete opposite. People like to argue which states would be better off in a civil war, meanwhile I grew up in an area where people liked to claim the south is going to rise yet again. And we do have a problem with militias.
Maybe you'd trust Blackrock's CEO instead? I live in the US and I have rotated away from US equities and treasuries to derisk from volatility of poor governance (both this administration and long term fiscal policy).
I don’t disagree that our fiscal situation is unsustainable. I’m curious specifically about the people envisioning (with barely disguised glee) the US erupting into a civil war within 5 years, as they seem somewhat to have lost touch with reality.
> I’m curious specifically about the people envisioning (with barely disguised glee) the US erupting into a civil war within 5 years, as they seem somewhat to have lost touch with reality.
The MN governor has called up their National Guard to help local law enforcement. The Pentagon is readying troops as well, presumably to help federal officials (ICE).
If both sides think they are following lawful orders, and neither side will give, what do you think will happen? (I have no answers.)
Further, there are folks that want a conflict because the West has become too decadent or something, and some conflict is needed to toughen up (?):
Federal supremacy will win, the MN governor will not tell local LE directly to prevent federal agents enforcing federal law. I understand that law is not popular among many right now, but that is how it will play out.
There will not be civil war unless the military truly comes to assist in a Trump attempt to take power in 2028, which I think is very unlikely.
The US military spent $4T-$6T in Iraq and Afghanistan, losing ~7k soldiers and ~52k wounded [1]. The US has one of the highest per capita of gun ownership and less than a million soldiers on US soil [2] [3]. Federal supremacy is based on the concept of the US military winning a conflict when they haven't won one since WW2. Force projection via military hardware and popping into Venezuela to extract its leader is a far different proposition than urban combat where your home and family is on the same soil.
I very much hope civil war is unlikely, but the federal government is vastly undermanned if a conflict occurs on US soil.
(have four siblings who have decades in combined military tours across all service branches except the coast guard, and I leverage them as a resource collectively in these matters)
> The US military spent $4T-$6T in Iraq and Afghanistan, losing ~7k soldiers and ~52k wounded
Denmark and the UK (to mention just two countries) also lost men fighting alongside America in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Look how they are being repaid.
Here is a rather sobering video from a British perspective: The Prime Minister responding to JD Vance by simply reading out in Parliament, the names of British soldiers who died supporting American operations.
In what world are Iraq / Afghanistan good "comps" for the US military's performance in a civil war? Those countries had a virtually endless supply of young men who wanted to die for their cause, due to religious fanaticism, and were willing to do anything to make that happen. Who is going to fulfill that role in this hypothetical civil war? The US military was also faced with 10,000 km long supply lines and extremely rugged terrain where no one had any local knowledge.
Why is it that every normalizing "this is fine" commenter invariably drops into the same nonsense about "enforcing federal law" after a few short comments? The problem in Minnesota isn't that [some] federal laws are being enforced. Rather it's that federal law enforcement "officers" are abusing their immunity to work as lawless terror squads, abducting citizens and attacking protestors, backed up by a demented chief executive who has no respect for our American ideals of individual liberty or limited government.
To note, I believe it's possible the ~1500 troops staging to Minnesota are not to assist with ICE operations, but to be air lifted via the 133rd Airlift Wing to Greenland. If interested in pursuing this, task some commercial satellite imaging.
If Trump decides to go pull the plug on invading Greenland an uses the 11th Airborne, McBride would, I would assume, at a minimum, be relieved of his duties with the 11th Airborne and sent back to Canada, with either a subordinate ops staff officer or the Deputy Commanding General (Support) or some combination filling in for the duties of the Deputy Commanding General (Operations).
Depending on the details of timing of the operation and the US-Canada diplomatic situation as a result, what happens after he is relieved might not be as simple as a return to Canada, he might conceivably even end up as a POW.
In longitudinal surveys, typically, about 5% of folks elect the "some men want to watch the world burn" option. I cannot speak to the glee component you mention, I know these people exist, but they are a minority. I can speak to the ongoing political polarization that treats national politics as a sport and is avoiding course correcting fiscal policy trajectory. And this fiscal policy is going to lead to widening wealth inequality, a continuation of a K shaped economic recovery, and pushing the electorate to more extreme options besides the voting booth. No one is "winning", there is no moderate middle ground any more, and I don't see how this trajectory will change. Thanks Gingrich (who set us on this path decades ago)!
> > the US erupting into a civil war within 5 years, as they seem somewhat to have lost touch with reality.
When your material needs are satisfied then only ideological battles remain to be won.
And having lots of material stuff you have plenty to throw at the enemy.
It's already happening. People are willing to forego their material needs and harm the country and themselves to 'own' and defeat the other side.
The only hope is that the ideological wars become so scattered and around so many topics and centers of power that it's not 70m people vs. 70m people or that the ideological wars are slow that people realize that they come with a loss of quality of life and material wealth and rebalance towards the latter instead of pursuing the 'owning the other side' doctrine
I think effectively all empirics go against this notion, the only real counterexample I can think of is the Troubles. People living comfortable lives don't want to die and the ideology usually routes around that: look how morality has been evolving wrt the notion of 'sacrifice for the common good' - and we expect people will sacrifice their lives for their perception of the common good? doubt it
> > People living comfortable lives don't want to die
Trump is the prime example , why did he decide to abandon the lifestyle afforded by his 500 million dollar net worth to pursue a job where 27% of his predecessors where shot at? Abandoning comfortable life to risk death.
Why don't rich celebrities quit after the first death threat letter, when they already have a huge bag of money?
The material wealth at the extremes is a recipe for unstable and unpredictable behavior , not for calm and collected behavior. People engage in ego battles and fall in love with their ideas and are willing to go to war for them as in a world of abundance they are the only thing that matters in order to 'win'.
The most abstract things (interest rates ring a bell) become personal because ideas about them were conceived in self reflection during the infinite hours of thinking and wondering free time afforded by material abundance, killing off ideas becomes akin to killing part of self and becomes unacceptable to the ego.
What could easily happen much sooner than 5 years is an incident that gives Trump an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act, and send federal troops - not just National Guard - into blue US cities. Things could go a lot of different ways after that, but something resembling civil war - or a smaller-scale guerilla war - is very much in the realm of possibility.
Be wary of normalcy bias, it's a big part of what lets the Trump admin get away with what its doing. People think "oh that can't happen"... until it does.
Warnings about the deficit are spot on. It is a safe bet that the country with government that spends 50% more than it takes in as taxes will not give above inflation return on its government debt. As a side note, most of the "Western world" is in the same boat (spending way above the long-term ability to pay, so eventually will have to default-by-inflation on bondholders).
But I am sure the poster you are responding to was criticizing the take about US splintering into parts due to armed unrest within the next 5 years. Which sounds completely nonsensical to me as well.
>Fink is still a big believer in the U.S. economy and argues things are looking mostly constructive at this point. He feels the bull story is still intact, but its durability matters a lot more.
So do you believe him? Let me guess: you'll pick and choose the parts
I agree with his statement you quote. I believe that the US still has some growth ahead purely out of existing demographics and population, but that due to go forward geopolitics and global trade reconfigurations, more growth will be had internationally than in the US over the next 5-10 years (and this is the same guidance I share with the HNW individuals I advise from geopolitical safety and portfolio strategy perspectives). Where has most growth been in the US recently? The Mag 7, AI, data centers, etc. Will this growth last? No one knows. What happens when it stops? Sadness.
I'm not gonna watch a video but did you even read that article before you linked to it?
"Fink is still a big believer in the U.S. economy and argues things are looking mostly constructive at this point. He feels the bull story is still intact, but its durability matters a lot more."
Markets are good at aggregating information. If there are so many obviously flawed predictions, I recommend you become one of the silly people as it sounds like you would quickly be rich.
I consider myself a progressive because I strongly support taxation and redistribution, but the modern media’s tendency to pearl-clutch over every new technological/market development is pretty alienating to me. Nothing in this article seems at all catastrophic.
We don’t need tax cuts, we need higher taxes and less spending on the rich&old. Our welfare system is completely backwards, if you are facing declining fertility and struggling young people - you don’t continue to tax the young to spend on the wealthier generation.
Unfortunately most young people don’t realize they are being hoodwinked and so poll extremely supportive of this scheme.
If you can generate code from the grammar then what exactly are you RLing? The point was to generate code in the first place so what does backpropagation get you here?
The grammar of this language is no more than a few hundred tokens (thousands at worst) & current LLMs support context windows in the millions of tokens.
Theorycrafting is very easy. Not a single person in this thread has shown any code to do what they're suggesting. You have access to the best models & yet you still haven't managed to prompt it to give you the code to prove your point so spare me any further theoretical responses. Either show the code to do exactly what you're saying is possible or admit you lack the relevant understanding to back up your claims.
> You have access to the best models & yet you still haven't managed to prompt it to give you the code to prove your point so spare me any further theoretical responses. Either show the code to do exactly what you're saying is possible
GPU poor here though...
To quote someone (you...) on the internet:
> More generally, don't ask random people on the internet to do work for you for free.
Claims require evidence & if you are unwilling to present it then admit you do not have any evidence to support your claims. It's not complicated. Either RL works & you have evidence or you do not know & can not claim that it works w/o first doing the required due diligence which (shockingly) actually requires work instead of empty theory crafting & hand waving.
Why would I do that? If you know something then quote the relevant passage & equation that says you can train code generators w/ RL on a novel language w/ little to no code to train on. More generally, don't ask random people on the internet to do work for you for free.
Your other comment sounded like you were interested in learning about how AI labs are applying RL to improve programming capability. If so, the DeepSeek R1 paper is a good introduction to the topic (maybe a bit out of date at this point, but very approachable). RL training works fine for low resource languages as long as you have tooling to verify outputs and enough compute to throw at the problem.
> Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a variant reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) (Schulman et al., 2017).
GRPO foregoes the critic model, instead estimating the baseline from group scores, significantly
reducing training resources. By solely using a subset of English instruction tuning data, GRPO
obtains a substantial improvement over the strong DeepSeekMath-Instruct, including both
in-domain (GSM8K: 82.9% → 88.2%, MATH: 46.8% → 51.7%) and out-of-domain mathematical
tasks (e.g., CMATH: 84.6% → 88.8%) during the reinforcement learning phase
> Similarly, for code competition prompts, a compiler can be utilized to evaluate the model’s responses against a suite of predefined test cases, thereby generating objective feedback on
correctness
None of those are novel domains w/ their own novel syntax & semantic validators, not to mention the dearth of readily available sources of examples for sampling the baselines. So again, where does it say it works for a programming language with nothing but a grammar & a compiler?
You're not going to get less confused by doubling down. None of your claims are valid & this is because you haven't actually tried to do what you're suggesting. Taking a grammar & compiler & RLing will get you nowhere.
I wonder whether we are perhaps the point of usefulness of 'next edit' code development in 2026 though.
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