My aunt is a republican lobbyist. She is also a drunk. This means that she gets drunk and texts my family her unfiltered thoughts all the time.
She absolutely thinks that tariffs magically make the US economy better in a very short time period. She thinks that the governments of the countries that she hates are paying them and that the tariffs are solving the deficit problem. She thinks that the number of manufacturing jobs in the US has skyrocketed.
> Almost all the comments acting like this is some truth bombshell, like people in trumpistan all thought raising tariffs magically made the us economy better. This is a straw man, no?
This is a person who is deeply involved in the mechanics of writing legislation supported by GOP legislators. I do not believe that she is uniquely dumb amongst right wingers who have access to the levers of power.
would explaining that Tarrifs are supposed to create comparative competition rather than get other countries pay fees dramatically change her world view?
Are you saying that my aunt would suddenly change her mind about the nature of the Trump tariffs to understand that they achieve a totally different outcome than she thinks over a totally different time frame?
She already thinks that Trump has saved american manufacturing and that the deficit problem is gone. Why would she change that opinion?
My understanding is that if she was corrected to the proper understanding of Tariffs, she would not change her support of the tariff. Therefore debunking what "dumb people think" is still pointless. Because they aren't really advocating for a particular policy, they are advocating for a direction which is well represented by a whole family of policies - in particular the strong form.
I hope in 2028 the electeds take a different path than Biden did in his administration. Currently, dem leadership seems to think this ends with them just getting elected. But it doesn't. Just taking power back and pretending that everything is normal again won't do it.
We need meaningful punishments for the people committing crimes within the Trump administration and we need systems in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
The US has to limit the power of the president and to remove the "the winner takes it all" principle from its "democracy".
Maybe the next election is the right moment to do something about it. I can't believe there will be a time where it's more obvious that the system is broken - other than after it's too late.
And the opposition party has proven itself to be unable to take actions necessary to prevent this sort of thing. The democrats could have used the Biden administration as an opportunity to try Trump for his crimes and establish new boundaries on the power of the president. Instead they just hoped he would vanish into the night and left space for his return.
If the dems win in 2026 and 2028, what is there to stop a return to fascism and further collapse in 2032?
I'm just talking about one report. I'm not waiting to hear from anyone. I just passively consume what happens to come my way, and this is the first report about this situation that I saw on HN and took time to read.
Please educate yourself. The message is not hidden like some cryptic puzzle. Read, read, read. And from more than just one news source. Many. Recognize the bias.
Its a particularly weird criticism given that Danny is a lawyer and has experience in the CS research community. He is especially well suited to address a criticism that the authors are trying to trick people into thinking their work is a scientific paper, which is plainly a ridiculous criticism.
Boston Univ. School of Law Research Paper No. 5870623
40 Pages Posted: 8 Dec 2025 Last revised: 13 Jan 2026
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What exactly is this document? It reads like a heavily cited op-ed, but is coming out of a law school from a professor there and calls itself a "research paper". Very strange.
EDIT: I looked up UC Journal of Law, and I think I was misled because I'm not familiar with the domain. They describe themselves as:
> Since 1949, UC Law Journal, formerly known as Hastings Law Journal, has published scholarly articles, essays, and student Notes on a broad range of legal topics. With roughly 100 members, UCLJ publishes six issues each year, reaching a large domestic and international audience. Each year, one issue is dedicated to essays and commentary from our annual symposium, which features speakers and panel discussions on an area of current interest and development in the law.
So this is congruent with the Journal's normal content (it's an essay), but having the document call itself a "research paper" conjured an inflated expectation about the rigor involved in the analysis, at least for me.
> So this is congruent with the Journal's normal content (it's an essay), but having the document call itself a "research paper" conjured an inflated expectation about the rigor involved in the analysis, at least for me.
Right. And I think it is weird that people immediately leapt to this being some sort of deception by the authors and I think it was weird that when a lawyer who has experience in both domains clarified this that people doubled down.
Yep, I agree that jumping to the "deception" angle would be pretty far down on my list. I always admired the simplicity of HN's guideline to focus on curiosity, since it has far-reaching effects on the nature of the discourse.
What do you mean "formatted like a scientific paper?"
Law review articles look like this. Scientific journals don't own the concept of an abstract, nor are law review articles pretending to be scientific research.
Sanctuary cities just mean that local police do not cooperate with ICE. Not only is local law enforcement not required to do this, but it is actually unconstitutional for local law enforcement to enforce immigration law on their own.
As for Obama's deportations. First, there were a lot of leftist communities who were vocally outraged by Obama's expansion of federal law enforcement. Second, Obama's deportations tended to focus on people with criminal histories and didn't involve things like agents executing what they believe are general warrants, detaining people while they attend their legally required hearings, deporting people to foreign concentration camps, etc.
Trump has absolutely no interest in the rule of law. He is interested in establishing a racial caste system.
She absolutely thinks that tariffs magically make the US economy better in a very short time period. She thinks that the governments of the countries that she hates are paying them and that the tariffs are solving the deficit problem. She thinks that the number of manufacturing jobs in the US has skyrocketed.
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